The Wisdom of Fools

by Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

William West got up with an impatient gesture. How absurd this sort of mental posturing and agonizing was! What folly, to think of burdening Amy with the miserable facts. Told now, twenty-three years afterwards, their relation to his present life could not be seen in true proportion. It would be an amazement and a shame to her to think that her lover, her husband, had done thus and so. Yet, it would not be her husband who was the sinner; it was that poor, foolish, wicked boy of so many years ago; that boy upon whom he looked back with the amazement and disgust of an outside observer. What a curious untruth, then, in confessing it. He gave a sigh of relief as he reached this conclusion; it was as if he had stumbled for a moment, but had got his balance again.

But, in spite of himself, his mind crept back to the brink of that black abyss of memory: those were dreadful days, those days of repentance twenty years ago. The remembrance of his sin would surge over him at the most unexpected moments—in the midst of work or study; when he was talking; when he was praying; when, perhaps, he was helping some other human creature stagger along under a burden of remorse. The deeper he went into the new life he had begun to lead—the clearer the heavenly vision grew before his eyes—the blacker the sin seemed. For years, the memory of it used to come over him with a sudden sinking and sickening of the soul. He remembered how inescapable the torment of his regret had been. There would be periods of forgetfulness, when he was plunged into work, and life, because it was service, seemed good and sweet; then, at some word, or the look of the sky, or the smell of a flower—the evil spirit of recollection would leap upon him and tear him. Yet the periods of forgetfulness had lengthened and lengthened. The pain and shame had faded and faded. The thing that gave him this sick feeling, as he sat here in his study at midnight, was not the fact that he had sinned; it was the memory of how he had suffered for his sin. The sin itself, now, was too remote, too separate from himself for any more repentance; it had ceased to be real. But the suffering!—he could not bear to think of that.

“How mad this is!” he said to himself, with a curious terror lest the old anguish should come back: the horror a man might feel who sees the surgeon’s knife under which he has once agonized.

For very fear of memory, William West drove his thoughts back to the question of his duty to Amy; that was plain reasoning, and had nothing to do with this nightmare.

He lighted another match, but held it absently, until it scorched his fingers, then flung it down with an angry exclamation. It seemed as though the pain burned through all this fog of the past, and showed him the facts which he must judge, and the folly of his uncertainty. For, after all, what was this matter he was trying to decide? Was it not merely the question of what was best for Amy, not what was most comfortable for himself? It was that abstraction called Honor, as applied to Amy’s happiness.

What was for her happiness, or, as he had put it first, what was his duty to her? To let her know his past, or to keep a secret from her, and allow her to suppose that she knew his life as she did her own?

Admit that it was his impulse to tell her; what did that impulse really mean? Primarily, that it would be a great relief to him; the idea of having any reserves was most repugnant to him. For the moment the instinct was again strong to tell her. But, frowning, he went on with his argument: A relief to him; but what to her? A pain and a shame; a memory that might outlast another twenty-three years, perhaps. But she might want to know it? Well, that was no reason. If she wanted poison, should he give it to her? And this was poison. Did he not know that? Good God!

But she had a right to know it? Here he was perfectly clear; certainly not. It in no wise bore upon his relation to her. Furthermore, the question of prudence was not involved; there was no chance that some day, somehow, it might come to her ears. She could never hear it, except from him. If this were not the case, of course he would tell her.

But was he deceiving her? Was he, as she put it, “taking her love on false pretenses”? William West got up and walked the length of his library; then he stopped by the open window, and looked out on the silent street; a policeman on his beat glanced up and saw him, and touched his helmet with two fingers.

“Good-evening, sir; don’t know but what I’d better say good-morning!”