I stayed over for the last train to Boston, and then I had to go home
without the hope which Miss Bentley's first rally had given the doctor.
My wife and I talked the affair over far into the night, and in the
paucity of particulars I was almost driven to their invention. But I
managed to keep a good conscience, and at the same time to satisfy the
demand for facts in a measure by the indulgence of conjectures which
Mrs. March continually took for them. The doctor had let fall, in his
talk with me, that he had no doubt Miss Bentley had aggravated the
affection of the heart from which she was suffering by her exertions in
lifting her mother about so much; and my wife said that it needed only
that touch to make the tragedy complete.
"Unless," I suggested, "you could add that her mother had just told her
she would not oppose her marriage any longer, and it was the joy that
brought on the access of the trouble that is killing her."
"Did the doctor say that?" Mrs. March demanded, severely.
"No. And I haven't the least notion that anything like it happened. But
if it had--"
"It would have been too tawdry. I'm ashamed of you for thinking of such
a thing, Basil."
Upon reflection, I was rather ashamed myself; but I plucked up courage
to venture: "It would be rather fine, wouldn't it, when that poor girl
is gone, if Mrs. Bentley had Glendenning come and live with her, and
they devoted themselves to each other for her daughter's sake?"
"Fine! It would be ghastly. What are you thinking of, my dear? How would
it be fine?"
"Oh, I mean dramatically," I apologized, and, not to make bad worse, I
said no more.
The next day, which was Sunday, a telegram came for me, which I decided,
without opening it, to be the announcement of the end. But it proved to
be a message from Mrs. Bentley, begging in most urgent terms that Mrs.
March and I would come to her at once, if possible. These terms left the
widest latitude for surmise, but none for choice, in the sad
circumstances, and we looked up the Sunday trains for Gormanville, and
went.
We found the poor woman piteously grateful, but by no means so
prostrated as we had expected. She was rather, as often happens, stayed
and held upright by the burden that had been laid upon her, and it was
with fortitude if not dignity that she appealed to us for our counsel,
and if possible our help, in a matter about which she had already
consulted the doctor. "The doctor says that the excitement cannot hurt
Edith; it may even help her, to propose it. I should like to do it, but
if you do not think well of it, I will not do it. I know it is too late
now to make up to her for the past," said Mrs. Bentley, and here she
gave way to the grief she had restrained hitherto.
"There is no one else," she went on, "who has been so intimately
acquainted with the facts of my daughter's engagement--no one else that
I can confide in or appeal to."
We both murmured that she was very good; but she put our politeness
somewhat peremptorily aside.
"It is the only thing I can do now, and it is useless to do that now. It
will be no reparation for the past, and it will be for myself and not
for her, as all that I have done in the past has been; but I wish to
know what you think of their getting married now."
I am afraid that if we had said what we thought of such a tardy and
futile proof of penitence we should have brought little comfort to the
mother's heart, but we looked at each other in the disgust we both felt
and said there would be a sacred fitness in it.
She was apparently much consoled.
It was touching enough, and I at least was affected by her tears; I am
not so sure my wife was. But she had instantly to consider how best to
propose the matter to Miss Bentley, and to act upon her decision.
After all, as she reported the fact to me later, it was very simple to
suggest her mother's wish to the girl, who listened to it with a perfect
intelligence in which there was no bitterness.
"They think I am going to die," she said, quietly, "and I can understand
how she feels. It seems such a mockery; but if she wishes it; and
Arthur--"
It was my part to deal with Glendenning, and I did not find it so easy.
"Marriage is for life and for earth," he said, solemnly, and I thought
very truly. "In the resurrection we shall be one another's without it. I
don't like to go through the form of such a sacrament idly; it seems
like a profanation of its mystery."
"But if Miss Bentley--"
"She will think whatever I do; I shall feel as she does," he answered,
with dignity.
"Yes, I know," I urged. "It would not be for her; it would not certainly
be for yourself. But if you could see it as the only form of reparation
which her mother can now offer you both, and the only mode of expressing
your own forgiveness--Recollect how you felt when you thought that it
was Mrs. Bentley's death; try to recall something of that terrible
time--"
"I don't forget that," he relented. "It was in mercy to Edith and me
that our trial is what it is: we have recognized that in the face of
eternity. I can forgive anything in gratitude for that."
* * * * *
I have often had to criticise life for a certain caprice with which she
treats the elements of drama, and mars the finest conditions of tragedy
with a touch of farce. No one who witnessed the marriage of Arthur
Glendenning and Edith Bentley had any belief that she would survive it
twenty-four hours; they themselves were wholly without hope in the
moment which for happier lovers is all hope. To me it was like a
funeral, but then most weddings are rather ghastly to look upon; and the
stroke that life had in reserve perhaps finally restored the lost
balance of gayety in this. At any rate, Mrs. Glendenning did live, and
she is living yet, and in rather more happiness than comes to most
people under brighter auspices. After long contention among many
doctors, the original opinion that her heart trouble was functional, not
organic, has been elected final, and upon these terms she bids fair to
live as long as any of us.
I do not know whether she will live as long as her mother, who seems to
have taken a fresh lease of years from her single act of self-sacrifice.
I cannot say whether Mrs. Bentley feels herself deceived and defrauded
by her daughter's recovery; but I have made my wife observe that it
would be just like life if she bore the young couple a sort of grudge
for unwittingly outwitting her. Certainly, on the day we lately spent
with them all at Gormanville, she seemed, in the slight attack of asthma
from which she suffered, to come as heavily and exactingly upon both as
she used to come upon her daughter alone. But I was glad to see that
Glendenning eagerly bore the greater part of the common burden. He grows
stouter and stouter, and will soon be the figure of a bishop.