Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  She called in the afternoon, and the young people dropped in again the same evening, and took the trouble to win back our simple hearts. That is, Miss Bentley showed herself again as frank and sweet as she had been on the boat when she joined my wife after dinner and left her mother in her state-room. Glendenning was again the Glendenning of our first meeting, and something more. He fearlessly led the way to intimacies of feeling with an expansion uncommon even in an accepted lover, and we made our conclusions that however subject he might be to his indefinitely future mother-in-law, he would not be at all so to his wife, if she could help it. He took the lead, but because she gave it him; and she displayed an aptness for conjugal submissiveness which almost amounted to genius. Whenever she spoke to either of us, it was with one eye on him to see if he liked what she was saying. It was so perfect that I doubted if it could last; but my wife said a girl like that could keep it up till she dropped. I have never been sure that she liked us as well as he did; I think it was part of her intense loyalty to seem to like us a great deal more.

  She was deeply in love, and nothing but her ladylike breeding kept her from being openly fond. I figured her in a sort of impassioned incandescence, such as only a pure and perhaps cold nature could burn into; and I amused myself a little with the sense of Glendenning’s apparent inadequacy. Sweet he was, and admirably gentle and fine; he had an unfailing good sense, and a very ready wisdom, as I grew more and more to perceive. But he was an inch or so shorter than Miss Bentley, and in his sunny blondness, with his golden red beard and hair, and his pinkish complexion, he wanted still more the effect of an emotional equality with her. He was very handsome, with features excellently regular; his smile was celestially beautiful; innocent gay lights danced in his blue eyes, through lashes and under brows that were a lighter blond than his beard and hair.

  VI.

  The next morning, which was of a Saturday, when I did not go to town, he came over to us again from the shadow of his sombre maples, and fell simply and naturally into talk about his engagement. He was much fuller in my wife’s presence than he had been with me alone, and told us the hopes he had of Mrs. Bentley’s yielding within a reasonable time. He seemed to gather encouragement from the sort of perspective he got the affair into by putting it before us, and finding her dissent to her daughter’s marriage so ridiculous in our eyes after her consent to her engagement that a woman of her great good sense evidently could not persist in it.

  “There is no personal objection to myself,” he said, with a modest satisfaction. “In fact, I think she really likes me, and only dislikes my engagement to Edith. But she knows that Edith is incapable of marrying against her mother’s will, or I of wishing her to do so; though there is nothing else to prevent us.”

  My wife allowed herself to say, “Isn’t it rather cruel of her?”

  “Why, no, not altogether; or not so much so as it might be in different circumstances. I make every allowance for her. In the first place, she is a great sufferer.”

  “Yes, I know,” my wife relented.

  “She suffers terribly from asthma. I don’t suppose she has lain down in bed for ten years. She sleeps in an easy-chair, and she’s never quite free from her trouble; when there’s a paroxysm of the disease, her anguish is frightful. I’ve never seen it, of course, but I have heard it; you hear it all through the house. Edith has the constant care of her. Her mother has to be perpetually moved and shifted in her chair, and Edith does this for her; she will let no one else come near her; Edith must look to the ventilation, and burn the pastilles which help her to breathe. She depends upon her every instant.” He had grown very solemn in voice and face, and he now said, “When I think of what she endures, it seems to me that it is I who am cruel even to dream of taking her daughter from her.”

  “Yes,” my wife assented.

  “But there is really no present question of that We are very happy as it is. We can wait, and wait willingly till Mrs. Bentley wishes us to wait no longer; or—”

  He stopped, and we were both aware of something in his mind which he put from him. He became a little pale, and sat looking very grave. Then he rose. “I don’t know whether to say how welcome you would be at St. Michael’s to-morrow, for you may not be—”

  “We are Unitarians, too,” said Mrs. March. “But we are coming to hear you.”

  “I am glad you are coming to church,” said Glendenning, putting away the personal tribute implied with a gentle dignity that became him.

  VII.

  We waited a discreet time before returning the call of the Bentley ladies, but not so long as to seem conscious. In fact, we had been softened towards Mrs. Bentley by what Glendenning told us of her suffering, and we were disposed to forgive a great deal of patronage and superiority to her asthma; they were not part of the disease, but still they were somehow to be considered with reference to it in her case.

  We were admitted by the maid, who came running down the hall stairway, with a preoccupied air, to the open door where we stood waiting. There were two great syringa-bushes on each hand close to the portal, which were in full flower, and which flung their sweetness through the doorway and the windows; but when we found ourselves in the dim old-fashioned parlor, we were aware of this odor meeting and mixing with another which descended from the floor above — the smell of some medicated pastille. There was a sound of anxious steps overhead, and a hurried closing of doors, with the mechanical sound of labored breathing.

  “We have come at a bad time,” I suggested.

  “Yes, why did they let us in?” cried my wife in an anguish of compassion and vexation. She repeated her question to Miss Bentley, who came down almost immediately, looking pale, indeed, but steady, and making a brave show of welcome.

  “My mother would have wished it,” she said, “and she sent me as soon as she knew who it was. You mustn’t be distressed,” she entreated, with a pathetic smile. “It’s really a kind of relief to her; anything is that takes her mind off herself for a moment. She will be so sorry to miss you, and you must come again as soon as you can.”

  “Oh, we will, we will!” cried my wife, in nothing less than a passion of meekness; and Miss Bentley went on to comfort her.

  “It’s dreadful, of course, but it isn’t as bad as it sounds, and it isn’t nearly so bad as it looks. She is used to it, and there is a great deal in that. Oh, don’t go!” she begged, at a movement Mrs. March made to rise. “The doctor is with her just now, and I’m not needed. It will be kind if you’ll stay; it’s a relief to be out of the room with a good excuse!” She even laughed a little as she said this; she went on to lead the talk away from what was so intensely in our minds, and presently I heard her and my wife speaking of other things. The power to do this is from some heroic quality in women’s minds that we do not credit them with; we think it their volatility, and I dare say I thought myself much better, or at least more serious in my make, because I could not follow them, and did not lose one of those hoarse gasps of the sufferer overhead. Occasionally there came a stifling cry that made me jump, inwardly if not outwardly, but those women had their drama to play, and they played it to the end.

  Miss Bentley came hospitably to the door with us, and waited there till she thought we could not see her turn and run swiftly up-stairs.

  “Why did you stay, my dear?” I groaned. “I felt as if I were personally smothering Mrs. Bentley every moment we were there.”

  “I had to do it. She wished it, and, as she said, it was a relief to have us there, though she was wishing us at the ends of the earth all the time. But what a ghastly life!”

  “Yes; and can you wonder that the poor woman doesn’t want to give her up, to lose the help and comfort she gets from her? It’s a wicked thing for that girl to think of marrying.”

  “What are you talking about, Basil? It’s a wicked thing for her not to think of it! She is wearing her life out, tearing it out, and she isn’t doing her mother a bit of good. Her mother would be just as well, and better, with
a good strong nurse, who could lift her this way and that, and change her about, without feeling her heart-strings wrung at every gasp, as that poor child must. Oh, I wish Glendenning was man enough to make her run off with him, and get married, in spite of everything. But, of course, that’s impossible — for a clergyman! And her sacrifice began so long ago that it’s become part of her life, and she’ll simply have to keep on.”

  VIII.

  When her attack passed off, Mrs. Bentley sent and begged my wife to come again and see her. She went without me, while I was in town, but she was so circumstantial in her report of her visit, when I came home, that I never felt quite sure I had not been present. What most interested us both was the extreme independence which the mother and daughter showed beyond a certain point, and the daughter’s great frankness in expressing her difference of feeling. We had already had some hint of this, the first day we met her, and we were not surprised at it now, my wife at first hand, or I at second hand. Mrs. Bentley opened the way for her daughter by saying that the worst of sickness was that it made one such an affliction to others. She lived in an atmosphere of devotion, she said, but her suffering left her so little of life that she could not help clinging selfishly to everything that remained.

  My wife perceived that this was meant for Miss Bentley, though it was spoken to herself; and Miss Bentley seemed to take the same view of the fact. She said: “We needn’t use any circumlocution with Mrs. March, mother. She knows just how the affair stands. You can say whatever you wish, though I don’t know why you should wish to say anything. You have made your own terms with us, and we are keeping them to the letter. What more can you ask? Do you want me to break with Mr. Glendenning? I will do that too, if you ask it. You have got everything but that, and you can have that at any time. But Arthur and I are perfectly satisfied as it is, and we can wait as long as you wish us to wait.”

  Her mother said: “I’m not allowed to forget that for a single hour,” and Miss Bentley said, “I never remind you of it unless you make me, mother. You may be thinking of it all the time, but it isn’t because of anything I say.”

  “Or that you do?” asked Mrs. Bentley; and her daughter answered, “I can’t help existing, of course.”

  My wife broke off from the account she was giving me of her visit: “You can imagine how pleasant all this was for me, Basil, and how anxious I was to prolong my call!”

  “Well,” I returned, “there were compensations. It was extremely interesting; it was life. You can’t deny that, my dear.”

  “It was more like death. Several times I was on the point of going, but you know when there’s been a painful scene you feel so sorry for the people who’ve made it that you can’t bear to leave them to themselves. I did get up to go, once, in mere self-defence, but they both urged me to stay, and I couldn’t help staying till they could talk of other things. But now tell me what you think of it all. Which should your feeling be with the most? That is what I want to get at before I tell you mine.”

  “Which side was I on when we talked about them last?”

  “Oh, when did we talk about them last? We are always talking about them! I am getting no good of the summer at all. I shall go home in the fall more jaded and worn out than when I came. To think that we should have this beautiful place, where we could be so happy and comfortable, if it were not for having this abnormal situation under our nose and eyes all the time!”

  “Abnormal? I don’t call it abnormal,” I began, and I was sensible of my wife’s thoughts leaving her own injuries for my point of view so swiftly that I could almost hear them whir.

  “Not abnormal!” she gasped.

  “No; only too natural. Isn’t it perfectly natural for an invalid like that to want to keep her daughter with her; and isn’t it perfectly natural for a daughter, with a New England sense of duty, to yield to her wish? You might say that she could get married and live at home, and then she and Glendenning could both devote themselves—”

  “No, no,” my wife broke in, “that wouldn’t do. Marriage is marriage; and it puts the husband and wife with each other first; when it doesn’t, it’s a miserable mockery.”

  “Even when there’s a sick mother in the case?”

  “A thousand sick mothers wouldn’t alter the case. And that’s what they all three instinctively know, and they’re doing the only thing they can do.”

  “Then I don’t see what we’re complaining of.”

  “Complaining of? We’re complaining of its being all wrong and — romantic. Her mother has asked more than she had any right to ask, and Miss Bentley has tried to do more than she can perform, and that has made them hate each other.”

  “Should you say hate, quite?”

  “It must come to that, if Mrs. Bentley lives.”

  “Then let us hope she—”

  “My dear!” cried Mrs. March, warningly.

  “Oh, come, now!” I retorted. “Do you mean to say that you haven’t thought how very much it would simplify the situation if—”

  “Of course I have! And that is the wicked part of it. It’s that that is wearing me out. It’s perfectly hideous!”

  “Well, fortunately we’re not actively concerned in the affair, and we needn’t take any measures in regard to it. We are mere spectators, and as I see it the situation is not only inevitable for Mrs. Bentley, but it has a sort of heroic propriety for Miss Bentley.”

  “And Glendenning?”

  “Oh, Glendenning isn’t provided for in my scheme.”

  “Then I can tell you that your scheme, Basil, is worse than worthless.”

  “I didn’t brag of it, my dear,” I said, meekly enough. “I’m sorry for him, but I can’t help him. He must provide for himself out of his religion.”

  IX.

  It was, indeed, a trying summer for our emotions, torn as we were between our pity for Mrs. Bentley and our compassion for her daughter. We had no repose, except when we centred our sympathies upon Glendenning, whom we could yearn over in tender regret without doing any one else wrong, or even criticising another. He was our great stay in that respect, and though a mere external witness might have thought that he had the easiest part, we who knew his gentle and affectionate nature could not but feel for him. We never concealed from ourselves certain foibles of his; I have hinted at one, and we should have liked it better if he had not been so sensible of the honor, from a worldly point, of being engaged to Miss Bentley. But this was a very innocent vanity, and he would have been willing to suffer for her mother and for herself, if she had let him. I have tried to insinuate how she would not let him, but freed him as much as possible from the stress of the situation, and assumed for him a mastery, a primacy, which he would never have assumed for himself. We thought this very pretty of her, and in fact she was capable of pretty things. What was hard and arrogant in her, and she was not without something of the kind at times, was like her mother; but even she, poor soul, had her good points, as I have attempted to suggest. We used to dwell upon them, when our talk with Glendenning grew confidential, as it was apt to do; for it seemed to console him to realize that her daughter and he were making their sacrifice to a not wholly unamiable person.

  He confided equally in my wife and myself, but there were times when I think he rather preferred the counsel of a man friend. Once when we had gone a walk into the country, which around Gormanville is of the pathetic Mid-Massachusetts loveliness and poverty, we sat down in a hillside orchard to rest, and he began abruptly to talk of his affair. Sometimes, he said, he felt that it was all an error, and he could not rid himself of the fear that an error persisted in was a wrong, and therefore a species of sin.

  “That is very interesting,” I said. “I wonder if there is anything in it? At first blush it looks so logical; but is it? Or are you simply getting morbid? What is the error? What is your error?”

  “You know,” he said, with a gentle refusal of my willingness to make light of his trouble. “It is surely an error to allow a woman to give her word
when she can promise nothing more, and to let her hold herself to it.”

  I could have told him that I did not think the error in this case was altogether or mainly his, or the persistence in it; for it had seemed to me from the beginning that the love between him and Miss Bentley was fully as much her affair as his, and that quite within the bounds of maidenly modesty she showed herself as passionately true to their plighted troth. But of course this would not do, and I had to be content with the ironical suggestion that he might try offering to release Miss Bentley.

  “Don’t laugh at me,” he implored, and I confess his tone would have taken from me any heart to do so.

  “My dear fellow,” I said, “I see your point. But don’t you think you are quite needlessly adding to your affliction by pressing it? You two are in the position which isn’t at all uncommon with engaged people, of having to wait upon exterior circumstances before you get married. Suppose you were prevented by poverty, as often happens? It would be a hardship as it is now; but in that case would your engagement be any less an error than it is now? I don’t think it would, and I don’t believe you think so either.”

  “In that case we should not be opposing our wills to the will of some one else, who has a better claim to her daughter’s allegiance than I have. It seems to me that our error was in letting her mother consent to our engagement if she would not or could not consent to our marriage. When it came to that we ought both to have had the strength to say that then there should be no engagement. It was my place to do that. I could have prevented the error which I can’t undo.”