VI
The senior warden of St. James was wrong when he said that his minister lost his moral grip. There was, no doubt, a time of upheaval and shock, a staggering under a calamity which seemed to have no moral excuse, to be only a senseless shattering of a human life.
But he got his balance again. He made no effort to see Amy. This was partly to spare her, and partly from a sense of the futility of argument; the thing was done; if she married him ten times over, it would not be the same. As she said, she had never known him; and perhaps he had never known her. But, for that matter, who of us knows the other? The question is, is it worth while to try to attain, or to bestow, such knowledge? Gossip, of course, had run riot when it was known that he had been jilted; but gossip, after it reaches a certain point of insult and falsehood, becomes a source of amusement to its victims. West, with his delicate sense of humor, found other people’s opinions of his sufferings not without interest. It being nobody’s business but his own, only three people besides Miss Townsend and himself knew the facts—the Pauls and his own lawyer; so no light was thrown upon the subject to Mercer, which seethed and bubbled, and made itself wildly ludicrous. The minister went away after that first fury of parish excitement was over, and came back in four months, quite brown, with a good appetite, and several very interesting pieces of tapestry which he had picked up on the other side. He dined a little less frequently at the Pauls’, and was never once reminded that Mrs. Paul had been instrumental in bringing him to Mercer.
He became, perhaps, a little more of a man’s man; a little more impatient with his feminine correspondents; a little less polite to the old ladies, who thought him less good-looking “since his disappointment.” But he took a deep and passionate hold upon affairs; the conditions of labor, the hideous problems of vice; the reformation of the sordid politics of the small city in which he lived,—these things filled his life. Were they enough? Who knows! We make husks into bread when the soul starves.
As for Amy, that is another story.
It was nearly two years after this that John Paul walked home one night with Mr. Woodhouse, who was a fellow vestryman of St. James. They had been sitting smoking by William West’s fireside, talking over a strike which was on in one of the mills, where it seemed as though the rights lay with the strikers; a fact which these gentlemen believed to be unusual. It was nearly midnight when they left the rectory and went along the empty, echoing street together.
“It strikes me,” said Mr. Paul, “that you hadn’t much to say for yourself to-night, Woodhouse. You’re the canniest fellow about giving an opinion! Didn’t you want to commit yourself?”
“I haven’t any opinion yet,” said the other man slowly; “and, somehow, I got to thinking—I say, John, after all, what do you make of West’s telling Miss Townsend that matter?”
“I think she didn’t know which side her bread was buttered,” John Paul said gruffly.
“Oh, that’s another question,” the lawyer said. “I think almost any woman is too good for almost any man. I wonder they don’t all think better of it at the last moment, and throw us over!”
“How long have you been married, Gifford?” the older man inquired cynically. “I’ll tell you what Kate says: Kate says if Amy could throw him over, she ought to have had the chance to. So she thinks West ought to have told her.”
“That’s like saying, if there is a chance of breaking your neck by taking some preposterous leap, take it,” the lawyer commented. “But as I look back at it now, and see how it has aged Billy, and—well, hardened him a little, I think—it seems such an unnecessary calamity; such a blunder! And yet”—
“Kate has views about heredity, and all that sort of thing,” Mr. Paul explained. “She says a woman has a right to say her children shan’t have a—shady character for a father. That was too much for me; I don’t generally contradict my Boss; it isn’t peaceful. But that was too much for me! Billy West shady! I gave my wife a piece of my mind. I tell you, Woodhouse, women are hard.”
“Well, but there’s something in that,” the lawyer protested. “A woman has not only a right, but a duty, to think of her children, and a possible moral taint”—
“Moral grandmother!” John Paul broke in; “West is one man in a hundred. I think he’s well rid of Amy: I told him so at the time. Why, look here; a man who has not repented of his sin has no inclination to confess it. And, having repented and made reparation, confession becomes a mere matter of expediency. Why, good heavens, Gifford! is there to be no escape from sin? What’s all this talk about forgiveness mean, if we’ve got to rake up the past and agonize over it as long as we live? Isn’t there any statute of limitation in things spiritual? I don’t believe any large mind dwells on its sins, any more than on its virtues! And yet,” he ended, suddenly cooling, “I swear it is a difficult question, the telling or not telling the girl you are going to marry.”
“If you bring it down to expediency, it’s simple enough,” Gifford Woodhouse said; “it was obviously inexpedient. Even if she had married him, and simply remembered, would either of them have been any better off? Would any end have been subserved by putting such painful knowledge on her conscience as well as his own? It was not as though there was a lady ‘with nine small children and one at the breast’ somewhere round the corner in the Past, who might turn up some day. That sort of sin affects the relation of the man and woman, and it may be simple prudence to confess. Though I think there is a question, even there. But in this case expediency, you might even call it unselfishness, would make him hold his tongue. The only thing is, perhaps there is something higher than expediency?”
They had reached Mr. Paul’s door; he pitched his cigar into the street and pulled out his keys, shaking them on the end of their chain.
“You mean, abstractly, is it right or wrong, under circumstances like these, where no third person is to be cleared or benefited, to tell? Does honor demand confession?”
“Yes,” said the vestryman; “was it a duty to speak, or a duty to be silent?”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Was West a fool or a saint?” insisted the younger man.
“I’ll be hanged if I know,” said the senior warden.