The Conwells came home from Europe the next summer, and we did not go
again to Gormanville. But from time to time we heard of the Bentleys,
and we heard to our great amaze that there was no change in the
situation, as concerned Miss Bentley and Glendenning. I think that later
it would have surprised us if we had learned that there was a change.
Their lives all seemed to have adjusted themselves to the conditions,
and we who were mere spectators came at last to feel nothing abnormal in
them.
Now and then we saw Glendenning, and now and then Miss Bentley came to
call upon Mrs. March, when she was in town. Her mother had given up her
Boston house, and they lived the whole year round at Gormanville, where
the air was good for Mrs. Bentley without her apparently being the
better for it; again, we heard in a roundabout way that their
circumstances were not so fortunate as they had been, and that they had
given up their Boston house partly from motives of economy.
There was no reason why our intimacy with the lovers' affairs should
continue, and it did not. Miss Bentley made mention of Glendenning, when
my wife saw her, with what Mrs. March decided to be an abiding fealty,
but without offer of confidence; and Glendenning, when we happened to
meet at rare intervals, did not invite me to more than formal inquiry
concerning the well-being of Mrs. Bentley and her daughter.
He was undoubtedly getting older, and he looked it. He was one of those
gentle natures which put on fat, not from self-indulgence, but from want
of resisting force, and the clerical waistcoat that buttoned black to
his throat swayed decidedly beyond a straight line at his waist. His
red-gold hair was getting thin, and though he wore it cut close all
round, it showed thinner on the crown than on the temples, and his pale
eyebrows were waning. He had a settled patience of look which would have
been a sadness, if there had not been mixed with it an air of resolute
cheerfulness. I am not sure that this kept it from being sad, either.
Miss Bentley, on her part, was no longer the young girl she was when we
met on the _Corinthian_. She must then have been about twenty, and she
was now twenty-six, but she looked thirty. Dark people show their age
early, and she showed hers in cheeks that grew thinner if not paler, and
in a purple shadow under her fine eyes. The parting of her black hair
was wider than it once was, and she wore it smooth in apparent disdain
of those arts of fluffing and fringing which give an air of vivacity, if
not of youth. I should say she had always been a serious girl, and now
she showed the effect of a life that could not have been gay for any
one.
The lovers promised themselves, as we knew, that Mrs. Bentley would
relent, and abandon what was more like a whimsical caprice than a
settled wish. But as time wore on, and she gave no sign of changing, I
have wondered whether some change did not come upon them, which affected
them towards each other without affecting their constancy. I fancied
their youthful passion taking on the sad color of patience, and
contenting itself more and more with such friendly companionship as
their fate afforded; it became, without marriage, that affectionate
comradery which wedded love passes into with the lapse of as many years
as they had been plighted. "What," I once suggested to my wife, in a
very darkling mood--"what if they should gradually grow apart, and end
in rejoicing that they had never been allowed to join their lives?
Wouldn't that be rather Hawthornesque?"
"It wouldn't be true," said Mrs. March, "and I don't see why you should
put such a notion upon Hawthorne. If you can't be more cheerful about
it, Basil, I wish you wouldn't talk of the affair at all."
"Oh, I'm quite willing to be cheerful about it, my dear," I returned;
"and, if you like, we will fancy Mrs. Bentley coming round and ardently
wishing their marriage, and their gayly protesting that after having
given the matter a great deal of thought they had decided it would be
better not to marry, but to live on separately for their own sake, just
as they have been doing for hers so long. Wouldn't that be cheerful?"
Mrs. March said that if I wished to tease it was because I had no ideas
on the subject, and she would advise me to drop it. I did so, for the
better part of the evening, but I could not relinquish it altogether.
"Do you think," I asked, finally, "that any sort of character will stand
the test of such a prolonged engagement?"
"Why not? Very indifferent characters stand the test of marriage, and
that's indefinitely prolonged."
"Yes, but it's not indefinite itself. Marriage is something very
distinct and permanent; but such an engagement as this has no sort of
future. It is a mere motionless present, without the inspiration of a
common life, and with no hope of release from durance except through a
chance that it will be sorrow instead of joy. I should think they would
go to pieces under the strain."
"But as you see they don't, perhaps the strain isn't so great after
all."
"Ah," I confessed, "there is that wonderful adaptation of the human soul
to any circumstances. It's the one thing that makes me respect our
fallen nature. Fallen? It seems to me that we ought to call it our risen
nature; it has steadily mounted with the responsibility that Adam took
for it--or Eve."
"I don't see," said my wife, pursuing her momentary advantage, "why they
should not be getting as much pleasure or happiness out of life as most
married people. Engagements are supposed to be very joyous, though I
think they're rather exciting and restless times, as a general thing. If
they've settled down to being merely engaged, I've no doubt they've
decided to make the best of being merely engaged as long as her mother
lives."
"There is that view of it," I assented.