“I did not believe this at the time. I knew the man to be able; I thought him fitted for Seaton’s place. I made up my mind what to do, believing this. Seaton went on to say that he would rather take my opinion.
“‘You know him well?’ he asked. ‘You’ve known him some time—seen quite a bit of him?’
“I said simply: ‘Yes.’ You know, my boy, that one can at times lie and steal and commit murder with a syllable? Well, I did that. But Seaton wanted it clear. He looked at me sharply.
“‘I’d be obliged for your opinion,’ he said. ‘I’m going to do as you say. Tell me this: would you yourself put the man in a position requiring not only brains but trustworthiness?’
“I waited a minute, a whole minute I think, not because I had one shred of doubt as to the crime I was about to commit—I waited to give emphasis to my answer. Then I lifted my head and looked Seaton in the eyes and said: ‘No.’ And many a man has been sent to state prison for less wickedness than those two small words, that ‘yes’ and that ‘no.’”
The wrinkled hand that lay on the table was clinched; never, in all the sermons that had cut to the souls of men, had the wonderful voice, with its intense reality, sincerity, been more charged with power than as the old clergyman told, in bare words, the story of his own sin. The boy thrilled as if a drama was played before him; it continued.
“I blasted the man’s future with two words. It closed the way for him in America. Seaton and I were his sponsors—any opening worth while would be referred to us; Seaton was not a man to keep still about such things. Within a week—” The bishop stopped. The strong tone hardened a little. “Within a week—she—the girl—told me that she was ready to keep her word and marry me but that she loved him. No”—the old man answered a look from the young one impetuously—“no—no one may blame her. She was honorable, true—only—she cared for him, not me. How could she help it?” The bishop’s sidewise smile came swiftly, without bitterness, only sadly. “He was brilliant, winning, and a great, splendid picture of a man. And I was—as you see—small and ugly.”
A glance of surprise flashed from the young eyes. “I don’t see, sir,” he said bluntly, and stared at the figure in the chair, a strong note in deep black of clothes and sharp white of collar, against the softness of the summer setting.
It is said that in another life the bodies we shall wear—not of flesh and blood, but as real—will be the close expression of personality; life loves sometimes here to take a human face and work out on it that thought. The bishop’s shone with the signs of such modelling. The man who at thirty-five had been, for all his intellect, ugly, at seventy-five carried a face whose radiance startled strangers in the street.
The bishop answered the boy’s look more than his words with a quick smile, and his eyes were pleased. Then they grew sober. “I must tell you the whole of this—you’ll see why. I went to Italy the night that she told me, and when I came home she had married him and gone away. I heard of them after that once—that his affairs had shaped as I’d planned—he had found no door open to him and had gone finally to—to Australia.”