"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.