Some one went to Mr. Bently's room for John, but came back without him. The invalid was reported to have flown into something like a passion on learning the messenger's errand, and to have held the dog firmly in his arms.
John was his! No one else should have him. Whatever crime it might be called to refuse to give him up—stealing, embezzling, false imprisonment—he was ready to be accused and convicted of it, and would go to jail for it with the dog in his arms.
Mrs. Clay was enchanted to be able to oblige her cousin in such a trifle, and would he speak freely when he wanted anything? and then went home and told all her family in confidence that Mr. Bently was a raving maniac.
Reader, according to our promises at the beginning of this history, we should stop here. The scene has changed, the time already exceeds twenty-four hours, and only the characters remain the same. But we have not done. There is something more which we are pining to tell. Shall we stop, then, and perish in silence, rather than transgress rules made by a people “dead and done with this many a year,” whose whole country, with themselves on it, could have been thrown into one of our inland seas without making it spill over? No! Perish the unities!
Scene II.—Large parlor, rosy-tinted all through with reflections from sunset, from firelight, and from red draperies. After-dinner silence pervading, open folding-doors giving a view through a suite of rooms, in the furthest of which an old gentleman sleeps in his arm-chair. Or, perhaps, it is a picture of a library, with an old gentleman asleep in it. The stillness is perfect enough for that. Mr. Bently, convalescent, first dinner down-stairs since his illness, stands near a window looking out, but watchful of the inside of the parlor, and of a lady who sits at an embroidery-frame near the same window. The lady is superficially dignified and tranquil, but there is an unusual color in the cheeks, and a slight unsteadiness in the fingers, which tell her secret conviction that something is going to happen. This is the first time the two have met since Miss Willis found the deserted man lying half senseless on Mrs. Clay's parlor floor.
He is thinking of that time now, and that an acknowledgment is due, and wondering how it is to be made, half a mind to be angry, rather than grateful, for the service. Such is man. All the bitterness of his lonely life rises up before him. Gray hairs are on his head, lines of age mark his face, but his heart protests against being set aside as too old for anything but dry speculation and love of abstract truth.
“I have been seeking for some proper terms in which to express to you my grateful sense of your humanity in coming to me when I was left sick and alone, but I cannot find them,” he said at length, facing her.
“There is no need to say anything about it,” she replied quietly, setting a careful silken stitch. “I could not have done otherwise.”
Having begun, the gentleman could not stop, or would not.
“I am sure you meant well, but did you do well?” he went on. “Could you not have been content to send the doctor, without coming yourself? Did you reflect that you [pg 637] were apparently incurring peril, and that for a man who had a heart as well as a head, and, worse yet, for a man whose heart had for years striven vainly to forget you? You have deprived me of the shield and support of even attempted indifference. I can no longer try to forget you, or think of you coldly, without the basest ingratitude.”