The Rev. William West went into his study and shut the door. He
was a man who was always accessible to his people, yet his lips
tightened with impatience when he found a parishioner awaiting him,
and saw a pile of notes on his writing-table. But it was only for
an instant; he listened to the anxieties of his caller with that
concentration of sympathy which can put self aside; and when the
man went away it was with the other man’s heartfelt grip of the
hand, his heartfelt “I thank you for coming to me; God bless you,
my friend, and give you wisdom.”
The letters were not so easy; but he went through them faithfully,
answering them or filing them away: appeals for help, or money, or
work; two invitations; two letters from ladies of his congregation
about their souls; the unmarried and interesting clergyman knows
this sort of letter too well! He was aware of a sense of haste
in getting through with these things; a sense of haste even in
disposing of another caller, a boy, who came to say he had doubts
about the existence of God, and who felt immensely important in
consequence. “I tell you, Mr. West,” this youth declared, nodding
his head, “of course I don’t mean to be hard on the church; of
course I see the value of such a belief in keeping the masses
straight, but, for thinking men!” To treat this sort of thing
seriously and patiently is one of the trials of a thinking man who
happens to be a minister. Then the Tenor came to give his side of
the quarrel with the Bass, and the organist to say that quartette
and chorus were all fools.
One does not prove the existence of God, or pacify wounded artistic
feelings easily; it was nearly midnight before the clergyman had
his library to himself.
With a sigh of relief he shut the door, and walked once or twice
about the room, as though trying to shake off other people’s
affairs; then he bit off the end of a cigar, struck a match, and
sat down. He put his hands deep into his pockets, and stretched
his feet straight out in front of him.
“It must be five years since I’ve thought of it,” he said to
himself.
He held his lighted cigar between his fingers, his chin sunk on his
breast, his mouth set in that hard line which refuses to extenuate
or evade; his eyes narrowed with thought. Five years: Yes, the
memory had so faded and lessened that by and by it had ceased, and
now it was as though, as he walked along the level path of daily
life, a serpent suddenly lifted its evil head from the dust, and
struck at him, hissing.
“I was eighteen,” he said to himself; “no, nineteen. And now I’m
forty-two! Twenty-nine, thirty-nine--it’s twenty-three years ago.”
There is a hideous consciousness which comes to most of us men and
women at one time or another in our lives, of our inability to get
away from the past. From out of the “roaring loom of Time” comes
the fabric of our lives; white, run, perhaps, with a warp of silver
in our latter years; set, even, by the mercy of God, with deep
jewels of experience; spangled with golden threads of opportunity;
but back, in its beginnings--what stains, what rents! dragged
through what foul and primeval experiences of youth! Some, by
environment and temperament, have nothing to blush for but follies;
the joyous baseness of the young animal never broke through the
conditions of their lives, or the dullness of their minds. But for
most there are black spots from which, with wonder and disgust, the
adult turns away his eyes: the cruelty and impurity of childhood;
the ingratitude and meanness of youth. With the man, as with the
race, that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is
natural.
Twenty-three years ago: is there any connection between a fault
committed then and the William West of to-day? None! What has he in
common with the boy of nineteen? Nothing!
Suppose he told Amy, would she understand that? Why, the very fact
that he had forgotten it meant that he did not belong to it, nor
it to him. And yet he wanted to tell her!
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!”
“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.
For the man to suffer now, twenty-three years after, was
unreasonable, but inevitable.
For a woman, who had no part or lot in that young past, to suffer
now, twenty-three years afterwards, was foolish and useless.
If the man permitted it, he was a coward and a fool.
This, at least, was what William West told himself.