When he sufficiently recovered from his astonishment at this oversight on Mrs. Mar’s part, he tried once or twice to introduce the subject of his claims into the family circle. But his wife firmly changed the conversation, as one who insists that painful bygones shall be bygones forever. Mar smiled inwardly, for Cheviot’s report had been glowing, and for Cheviot to write like that—well, it was, as the sage said, significant of much. But Cheviot was still “in Alaska, looking after things,” and Mar kept his own counsel.
It was plain that these last years had left their mark upon his wife. He laid the change at first to the disintegrating action of time upon even that hard, bright surface. He never knew the secret rage he caused by attributing to the weakness of age what was due to a hard-won self-mastery, a realized and ripened affection. Only little by little did he become aware that the alteration, so far from being a sign of letting-go, was evidence of a fresh taking-hold; a courageous determination not to shrink from making unpleasant discoveries about herself merely because she was of an age when most people cease to make discoveries of any sort.
Whatever pains her late-won knowledge cost Mrs. Mar, her family, and especially her old and broken husband, reaped some benefit of that lady’s ability to go on learning at a time of life when the majority think it rather noble if they make so much as an effort to teach.
It is probable that, failing Hildegarde, Mar might never have grasped the full meaning of the enlightenment that had come to his life’s partner during these three years of his absence. Upon that first glimpse of him, as he came limping in at the door, his wife had looked at him with a face no one who saw could forget. “It’s been hard for you, too,” she said.
“For me, too?” he echoed, wondering.
But she had no other word, either then or after—no gift of tender apology, nor even of explanation. Her task, as she conceived it, was not to talk about a long past that was irrevocable, but to “show” the possibility of a brief future that she felt to be still within their reach.
For Hildegarde all life had come to a standstill.
Weeks must go by before Bella, at her old friend’s urgent summons, could get back from abroad.
Hildegarde’s soreness of heart, her hopelessness of the greater gladness for herself, left her the freer to think of it as only half an achievement—this bringing her father back in the flesh. She must see his spirit “at home” before her task was ended. No discreet opportunity was lost to set her mother in an explanatory light. When the neighbors chorused admiration of the girl’s pluck and resourcefulness on the great journey, oh-ing and ah-ing, and “How on earth did you manage?”—“It was never the least difficult,” Hildegarde would interrupt. “When I was at a loss I always thought how my mother would take hold of the matter, and when I had imagined her into my perplexity it wasn’t a perplexity any longer. I saw just what she would do, and I saw it was just right.”
Only once, with her father alone, did she venture openly to suggest a corrected judgment of the past.