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."
"I don't see how it could have been easier to prevent than to undo your
error. I don't admit it's an error, but I call it so because you do.
After all, an engagement is nothing but an open confession between two
people that they are in love with each other and wish to marry. There
need be no sort of pledge or promise to make the engagement binding, if
there is love. It's the love that binds."
"Yes."
"It bound you from your first acknowledgment of it, and unless you could
deny your love now, or hereafter, it must always bind you. If you own
that you still love each other, you are still engaged, no matter how
much you release each other. Could you think of loving her and marrying
some one else? Could she love you and marry another? There isn't any
error, unless you've mistaken your feeling for each other. If you have,
I should decidedly say you couldn't break your engagement too soon. In
fact, there wouldn't be any real engagement to break."
"Of course you are right," said Glendenning, but not so strenuously as
he might.
I had a feeling that he had not put forward the main cause of his
unhappiness, though he had given a true cause; that he had made some
lesser sense of wrong stand for a greater, as people often do in
confessing themselves; and I was not surprised when he presently added:
"It is not merely the fact that she is bound in that way, and that her
young life is passing in this sort of hopeless patience, but
that--that--I don't know how to put the ugly and wicked thing into
words, but I assure you that sometimes when I think--when I'm aware that
I know--Ah, I can't say it!"
"I fancy I understand what you mean, my dear boy," I said, and in the
right of my ten years' seniority I put my hand caressingly on his
shoulder, "and you are no more guilty than I am in knowing that if Mrs.
Bentley were not in the way there would be no obstacle to your
happiness."
"But such a cognition is of hell," he cried, and he let his face fall
into his hands and sobbed heartrendingly.
"Yes," I said, "such a cognition is of hell; you are quite right. So are
all evil concepts and knowledges; but so long as they are merely things
of our intelligence, they are no part of us, and we are not guilty of
them."
"No; I trust not, I trust not," he returned, and I let him sob his
trouble out before I spoke again; and then I began with a laugh of
unfeigned gayety. Something that my wife had hinted in one of our talks
about the lovers freakishly presented itself to my mind, and I said,
"There is a way, and a very practical way, to put an end to the anomaly
you feel in an engagement which doesn't imply a marriage."
"And what is that?" he asked, not very hopefully; but he dried his eyes
and calmed himself.
"Well, speaking after the manner of men, you might run off with Miss
Bentley."
All the blood in his body flushed into his face. "Don't!" he gasped, and
I divined that what I had said must have been in his thoughts before,
and I laughed again. "It wouldn't do," he added, piteously. "The
scandal--I am a clergyman, and my parish--"
I perceived that no moral scruple presented itself to him; when it came
to the point, he was simply and naturally a lover, like any other man;
and I persisted: "It would only be a seven days' wonder. I never heard
of a clergyman's running away to be married; but they must have
sometimes done it. Come, I don't believe you'd have to plead hard with
Miss Bentley, and Mrs. March and I will aid and abet you to the limit of
our small ability. I'm sure that if I wrap up warm against the night
air, she will let me go and help you hold the rope-ladder taut."