“It’s not over,” insisted Amy’s cousin; “I shall see her; this thing can’t go on. I’ll send for you; you are well rid of her; it will be all right, I”—Storming and protesting and contradicting himself, he went out of the rectory, scarcely noticing that his host saw him to the door, and let him out, in absolute silence.
Then William West went back and locked himself into his library.
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?”