FAMILY CONSULTATIONS.
Bentley sought his daughter, for she alone had a right to share his
doubts and help in his decision. He found her, just after Woodworth had
departed, happy, but a little serious; for she had begun to reflect upon
the fate that lay before her father, should Hurst maintain his
pretensions to the estate. Proud, sensitive, and blessed with a
refinement of taste which renders the coarse things and harsh passages
of life almost unendurable, what would he do with poverty? It was a
phase of life he had outrun years ago; and now, with all his habits
fixed, and his tastes refined into sources of exquisite enjoyment, must
he give up every thing, and become a recluse, or a dependent?
These thoughts had saddened Gillian a little amid her happiness. It
seemed as if, in marrying Woodworth, she abandoned her father to
loneliness, or secured for him only the humiliation of dependence. Then
a thousand questions arose that she wished to ask. That conversation
with her Uncle Daniel, in the old stone-house, in which her mother’s
history had been so entangled with that of Aunt Hetty, rose freshly to
her mind. She longed to know more of all this, and felt free to question
her father as she had never done before.
Bentley sat down by Gillian, and told her of his interview with the old
women, and of that which followed with Aunt Hetty, who had secretly left
the house on the morning after the party. Word for word he repeated the
conversation, and described the scene.
Gillian listened gravely; her quick intellect seized upon the facts, and
came to conclusions almost before they were uttered.
“Father,” she said, “there is something wrong in this! If the marriage
was ever solemnized, why was it kept secret? Why did she falter when
that question came up, and yet claim her son so boldly? Besides, was my
mother a woman to leave this property in your hands, and share it with
you, if she had suspected this?”
Bentley started: he had never thought of this. It was implicating the
integrity of his dead wife if he yielded to this demand, blackening the
fame which had just been rescued from suspicion. His brow became dark at
this, and his heart grew anxious again. Gillian watched the changes of
his countenance with tender anxiety.
“Papa, tell me of my mother. Did you love her?”
The blood, always so cool, flashed up like fire, reddening that pale
forehead, and burning in his eyes.
“Love her, Gillian? Yes, better than my own soul.”
“And you were happy together?”
“For a time, Gillian, happy beyond any thing I can describe. Your mother
was a woman to make a heaven of life: she brightened every thing around
her!”
“And died so early?” said Gillian, drooping her eyes, and sighing
heavily. “Oh, father, tell me of her death. I never heard you speak of
it!”
“First,” said Bentley, and his sharp, quick breathing betrayed the
suppressed agitation which only made him a little pale—“first let me
tell you of her life—how I found her.”
“Uncle Daniel told me of that, papa; all about your cousin being killed,
and the trouble it caused; about Aunt Hetty’s coming to town. I thought
at first it was my mother who felt the loss most; but now——”
“Now,” said Bentley, “she is proved by her unhappy sister’s confession
to have been a creature so noble that a husband should have gloried in
her. She was endowed with every thing grand and good. She was a martyr
to her family, an angel to me, and yet I destroyed her.”
“Father!”
“Yes, look surprised! Let my words drain the color from your cheek. It
is a truth, I destroyed her, stung her pride to the quick, wounded her
delicacy, trampled on all that was sensitive or grand in her nature.
Blows would have been far more kind. Gillian, I suspected your mother!”
“Suspected my mother?”
“Yes, the world would say I had cause. It sprang out of this mystery, or
this sin, which is developing itself now. Your mother was frank to a
fault, generous beyond any person I ever heard of. It was not the
generosity which gives alone, but a spirit of self-sacrifice, a
disposition to take up the burdens of those who were weaker than
herself, and carry them forward. It did not require that the person
helped should be her friend or agreeable to her taste. Humanity was
enough to claim a sacrifice of her. She loved to do good for the sweet
reward which sprang up in her own heart. Yet she had a thousand
disguises for this weakness, as she called it; and, to hear her talk,
you would have fancied her a reckless, bright creature, capable of
impulsive kindness, but little more. She was like you, Gillian, not so
beautiful in one way, perhaps, but with a world of fresh vigor, of
reckless joyousness, and with a susceptibility of sadness that you have
never dreamed of.”
“Oh, if I had but known her!” sighed Gillian.
“She was a woman to worship, Gillian; fresh as the flowers of an
untrodden wilderness, quick to think, earnest to act. Her impetuosity
sometimes troubled me a little, for I had been educated with more social
restraints, and was over-sensitive to appearances; but after living so
long in the dead level of conventionalisms, her very faults appear to me
as virtues now.”
“No wonder you loved her—no wonder!”
Bentley bowed his head; a feeling of heavy self-abasement crept over
him. He could not look Gillian in the face. At last he spoke with hoarse
slowness.
“I am naturally suspicious!”
“You, papa?”
“Distrustful, rather. I loved my wife, God only knows how well; but from
the first there was something about her acquaintance with my cousin that
troubled me. Frank in all things else, she was silent if his name was
mentioned; even before I married her the idea of an attachment between
them had disturbed me. Her grief at his death was terrible. It seemed
like despair.”
“It was strange. I thought so when Uncle Daniel told me about it. Now it
is clear. She was grieving for her sister, striving to shield her
sister,” said Gillian.
“I knew that she had a secret,” continued Bentley, wrapped in his own
thoughts; “that she had some object of interest in the city which was
never mentioned in her home. There was a clergyman by the name of Frost
whom she visited often, and with some appearance of mystery. At times
she came to me for money, and no purchase followed, a thing that struck
me as strange; for she had a sumptuous love of the beautiful, and a
fabric or gem that gratified this passion made her happy as a child.
Indeed, in many things, she was like a child, always in trifles, though,
in important things, she added almost masculine strength to more womanly
tenderness than I ever saw in a human heart. These little things made me
distrustful. I wondered why this woman; to whose nature a secret was
repulsive, had one from her own husband.
“One day, it was when you were a little thing, Gillian, a trunk was sent
down from your Uncle Daniel’s, which had belonged to William Bentley. In
it had been placed the coat which my cousin wore the day he was killed.
Scrupulously honest in all things, Daniel had found the trunk in his
garret, and so forwarded it to the city.
“Sarah was out when the trunk arrived. I opened it, took up the coat
carelessly, and a pocket-book fell out of a side pocket. In that book I
found a letter from my wife to William Bentley——”
“Well, father!” said Gillian, holding her breath.
“It was a passionate appeal to his honor—a wild, urgent request that he
should save her and her family from disgrace. It was a letter written in
distraction, eloquent beyond any thing I ever read; such as Sarah would
write if driven wild by danger, or threatened with disgrace.”
Gillian listened, turning pale and cold, till she remembered all that
had transpired regarding her aunt. Then her breath came out in quick
gushes, and she burst into a passion of tears.
“My mother, my great-hearted mother, it was for her only sister she was
pleading; it was to save my grandfather’s gray hairs from dishonor!”
“I read the letter, and it maddened me. But my temperament is firm; I
knew how to wait. After that I traced your mother to a house in the
city; I saw her with my own eyes caressing a child—a bright, handsome
boy, whose very look was death to me. At night I gave your mother the
letter, and told her that she had been traced in her visits to the
living guilt, which would forever be an evidence against her. She was at
first dumb and cold as marble. Then with a look that made my blood burn,
she turned from me.
“I had some wild hope that she might explain; but she attempted nothing
of the kind, though her air had more than the grandeur of innocence: all
that she said was—
“‘For my father’s sake, give me silence! I ask nothing, deny nothing.
But my father is an old man, and the thought of disgrace would kill
him.’
“‘We must part,’ I said, driven to madness by her acquiescence in the
charge I had made.
“‘I know that,’ she said, with terrible sadness. ‘If you could think
this of me, it is enough. But in silence, let it be in silence, if not
for my sake, think of our child.’
“It was settled. From that time she grew to be a stranger. We suffered
the agony of each other’s presence, and that was all. Either in time or
eternity I shall never know agony like that.
“It was arranged that our shame should be locked up forever. We went to
Europe directly, up the Mediterranean, on to Naples. There I left your
mother—first separating her from her child, whom I placed in a convent.
For myself, I went on to Turkey, Egypt, and the Holy Land, a weary,
heavy-hearted man; God help me, for I loved the woman I had left!
“She would take no money from me; but I was not to be repulsed, and
forced a sum upon her before leaving her a stranger in a strange land.
“Two years after, I came back to Naples and inquired after my wife. They
told me that the fair woman from America had remained some months in the
city, growing paler and paler each day till she died. You have seen the
place in the _Campo Sante_ where she sleeps, Gillian!”
“And now she is dead, and you know how innocent she was!” cried Gillian,
weaving her hands together. “Oh, my mother—my mother!”
“It was I that killed—I, her husband! If her child hates me, it is but
just.”
“Father, the wrong was not yours—not hers. It was the sin of that
miserable, miserable woman—she whose son would now cast us into poverty.
Never, while I live, shall this thing be. Tell him that you contest this
claim—that his father’s sin has done its last work with us.”
“But my wife died to save this woman from disgrace. We can only contest
her son’s claim by proving that which she suffered martyrdom to
conceal.”
“True, true!” said Gillian; “and must the innocent always suffer for the
guilty? Must this weak, miserable woman darken our lives forever?”
“She is your mother’s sister—your grandfather’s child!”
“Alas! yes!”
“Shall we, in order to save Bentley’s property, heap disgrace on her
family?”
“No, no, papa—better any thing than that. Poor Uncle Daniel—it would
kill him.”
“To be dragged through a court of law, hear her name bandied by counsel,
printed in a hundred journals—what would poverty be compared to that?”
said Bentley.
Gillian shuddered.
“Father,” she said, “we have gone too far. This is a terrible epoch in
our lives; I cannot leave you yet. Mr. Woodworth must wait till we
become a little used to poverty.”
“Well, my child, we will consider that; but these two people shall not
shipwreck your happiness.”
“Let us go to Uncle Daniel,” said Gillian. “He is honest and
true-hearted. Let us all go at once.”
They went.