Later, when Jim was alone once more, he took this mysterious packet from the drawer, and, seating himself upon the sofa beside the fire, cut the string.
The nature of the contents was at once apparent: they were the relics of an affair of the heart, and a glance at the signature of two or three of the letters revealed the fact that the writer was not Jim’s aunt. “Ah,” said he, with satisfaction, “then the old paragon was human, like all the rest of us.”
A perusal of the badly-written pages, however, dispelled the atmosphere of romance which the first short messages of twenty years ago had promised. The story began well enough, so far as he could gather. The lady, whose name was Emily, had evidently lost her heart to her middle-aged lover, and was delighted with the little house he had provided for her in a London suburb. Two or three years later she became a mother, but the child had died, and there was a pathetic document recording her grief. In more recent years the intrigue had developed into an established union; and Emily, now grown complacent, and probably fat, became a secondary spouse and mistress of the old gentleman’s alternative home. The tale ended, however, with Emily’s marriage, two years ago, at the age of forty, to a young city clerk; and the only romantic features of the close of his uncle’s double life was the fact that he had preserved a little handkerchief of hers and a dead rose.
“Well, Emily,” said Jim, aloud, “I wish you luck, wherever you are”; and with that he gently thrust the relics into the flames.
For some time he lay back upon the sofa in the firelight, his arms behind his head, and thought over the story which had been revealed. It seemed, then, that the Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not be found out,” was the essential of respectable life. A man could do what he liked, provided that his delinquencies were hidden from his neighbours. Was this sheer hypocrisy?—or was there some principle behind the code? Did not Plato once say: “Every man should exert himself never to appear to any one to be of base metal?” He had read the quotation somewhere. Ought a man’s epitaph, then, to be: “He lived nobly, in that he kept up appearances”?—or would it be better frankly to write: “He tried to walk delicately, but the old Adam tripped him up?”
What would the vicar, what would Miss Proudfoote, have said had either of them known of this double life? Where would then have been the beautiful example of a goodly life which his uncle had left behind him as an inspiration to the whole neighbourhood? Was it not better that the secret was kept?
He found no answer to the questions which he thus put to himself; and all that was apparent to him was that decent society was based not upon the truth, but upon the hiding of the truth, and that the more lofty the pretence the more high-principled would be the community. “Truly,” he muttered, “we Anglo-Saxons are called hypocrites; but it is our hypocrisy that keeps us clean!” And with that he returned to his guitar.
A few days later he took Dolly for a walk across the fields. It was an autumnal afternoon, and although the sun shone down from a cloudless sky, there was a chilly haze over the land, which presaged the coming of the first frosts.
“I don’t know how I’m going to stand an English winter,” he said to her, as they sat to rest upon a stile, under an oak from which the leaves were falling. “Just look at the branches up there. They are nearly bare already.” He shuddered.
She looked at him almost reproachfully. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear you say that,” she replied. “I love the winter. I am a child of the North, you know. To me the grey skies and the bare trees have a sort of meaning I can’t quite explain. They are so ... so English. Think of the long, dark evenings, when you sit over the hearth, and the firelight jumps and dances about the walls. Think how cosy one feels when one is tucked up in bed.”