“What! Is it as late as all that, Reilly?” the minister said; and added a friendly inquiry about the man’s hand, which seemed to be hurt. Amy’s stern sense of the retributive justice of the accident came into his mind, and he smiled involuntarily. The policeman looked sheepish, as the clergyman meant he should, and turned the conversation by remarking that he would “be lookin’ after the rectory special when Mr. West was away on his weddin’ tower.”
“Thank you, Reilly!” the other answered heartily.
The policeman’s steps went echoing off into the night; a street lamp flickered, and a puff of soft wind wandered into the window.
Deceiving her: taking her love under false pretenses.
Was he anything but the man Amy supposed him to be? Very humbly, very truly, he said to himself that, by the grace of God, he was an honest, pure, God-fearing man. That sin of twenty-three years ago was not his sin. He, William West, forty-two years old, whose honorable record in the community was spread through all these years of service, was not that base, mean, wicked boy. The sin was not his. It was a sin of youth; a sin almost of childhood. It meant nothing to him now.
“It is nothing now,” he insisted, passionately. Accustomed to weigh other people’s actions and motives, he knew that he was discriminating with almost judicial impartiality when he thus looked himself in the face. “A repentant man has no more to do with his sin, for which he has repented and made reparation, than a well man has to do with the disease of which he has been cured.” He remembered that he had used this illustration once to some one else; he must apply it now to himself. No; he was not deceiving Amy. He was only sparing her—sparing her, to be sure, from a pain she might wish to bear, but that had nothing to do with the question. If she knew, she would suffer; not from a fact, but from an illusion; for he would be confessing a sin which was not his sin. Honor? The word seemed artificial as he thus put the situation before him.
No; it would be cowardly to tell her, and it would be untrue. There was nothing for him to do but face the fact that, to spare her, he must bear, for the rest of his life, the wretched burden of realizing that he had a secret from her.
Sanely, truly, this good man believed that his impulse to tell the woman he loved was selfish and cowardly; it was an impulse to make her share a burden which he deserved to bear alone. Furthermore, it was the effect, not of reason, not of religion, not of love; it was the effect, first, of the selfish desire to seek relief by sharing a cruel knowledge; secondly, of a traditional sentimentality, the weak and driveling outcome of that sense of justice which is expressed in the willingness to bear consequences.
Well, the boy who had sinned had borne the consequences; he had suffered.