Chapter XXXVI: 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.