Part 3

Well, the day passed. In spite of a craving to see Amy that was almost agonizing, he held on to his common-sense, and left her to herself. In the evening, his lawyer came in, bringing some papers in regard to certain property which it was the minister’s intention to make over to his wife, and the looking these over, and the business talk, was a relief to him. He began to feel that he had taken Amy’s perturbation much too seriously; it would be all right; she would see things clearly when the first dismay had passed. He thought, tenderly, that he must not let her feel any regret for having for a moment shown him her pain at what he had told her. Her pain was only part of her exquisite goodness, that goodness which held her, remote and lovely, like some pure and luminous star, so far above the sordid meannesses and wickednesses of common life that she could not understand them; perhaps even she could not pity them. Only the sinlessness which was in all points tempted like as we are can at once understand and pity; his thought, chastened and passionate, fled back to his Master for comfort,--yet there was no reproach of Amy in his mind.

It must have been after ten, as he and Mr. Woodhouse sat before the broad writing-table, with the litter of papers and memoranda before them, that John Paul suddenly burst into the room.

The senior warden’s strong, kind face was flushed; he was plainly profoundly disturbed and upset.

“West”--he said explosively, and stopped, seeing that they were not alone. “My dear fellow,” he began again, stammering with agitation, “can I see you a moment? A matter of business, Woodhouse, if you don’t mind. Can we go into another room, West?”

But the lawyer protested that he was just about to go home. “I have married a wife; you’ll see how it is yourself, Billy, pretty soon! Lois allows me twenty minutes leeway of the hour I name to get home, and if I’m not back then, she threatens to send a policeman after me. Good-night. Good-night, John.” And he went whistling off into the night.

The minister had not spoken.

“Look here,” John Paul said, as the front door banged, “what under the sun is this business? Good Lord, West, Amy’s sent you a letter--Kate told me to break it to you, but I--confound it, man--go and read it. The girl’s crazy. Go and read it. What are we going to do?”

Without a word William West took the letter and read it, standing facing Mr. Paul. (“It looked,” John Paul told his wife afterwards, “as though he died, then and there.”)

“_You were right to tell me--only please--please don’t make me marry you. I cannot. I could never forget. If it were anything else--anything else--it would be different; but theft--oh, how cruel I am to say that! but I cannot marry you. There’s no use talking about forgiveness. I don’t want you to forgive me. I want you to hate me; then you will suffer less. Hate me. I’m not worth anything else. I’m going home to-morrow. It can be said I am ill, and the wedding is put off. I am ill, it won’t be a lie. Please don’t ask to see me. I cannot see you. Forgive me._

_A._”

William West sat down, folding the letter between his fingers.

“There’s nothing to be said.” He spoke very quietly. Then he opened the letter again, and looked down at it.

“West, for God’s sake,” John Paul entreated him; “listen, man! don’t take it like that. The girl is out of her mind. Here, pull yourself together! It’s a passing whim; you will bring her to her senses as soon as you see her.”

“She will not see me,” he said. As he spoke his eye caught the headlines of the deed of gift, and he read them absently:--

“=This Indenture= _made this ---- day of ----, Anno Domini 18--, Witnesseth: that William West, the grantor, for divers good and valuable considerations to him moving, has, and by these presents does give, grant, and convey_”--

The fold in the deed hid the rest.

“She’s got to see you!” John Paul said angrily. “What’s the matter with her? Is she out of her senses? All I know is what Kate told me. She asked me to bring you the letter. She said Amy had broken her engagement. You could have knocked me over with a straw. She wouldn’t give any reasons. But I’m touched by this business. If a woman in my household suddenly forgets honor and common decency, I’m touched by it! Unless you’ve given her cause?”

He walked up and down, breathing hard, his hands thrust into his pockets, jingling his latchkeys for the mere relief of doing something. William West put the little note into his pocket.

“I’ve given her cause,” he said.

His senior warden stopped in front of him, and looked at him critically. “You’re lying to me. I know you! It’s a girl’s whim, and I’m touched by it, I tell you. She’s a member of my family. I shall see her (she wouldn’t see me before I started here), and straighten this business out. Kate is nearly dead with it. My wife looked like a ghost when she came and told me--and the wedding day after to-morrow! No; I’m going to straighten this thing out. What I want you to do is to tell me, man to man, what started it?”

“Amy is perfectly justified,” William West said dully. “I told her this morning that I had committed a forgery.”

“A--?” John Paul sat down, his mouth open, his plump hands on his knees, his eyes starting from his head.

“You are out of your mind!”

William West laughed shortly.

“I think, perhaps, I was when I told her. Yes; I was a fool. It was twenty-three years ago; I had just about forgotten it. When I remembered, I told her. It was too much for her. She is right to stop now. If she can throw me over, thank Heaven she has done so!”

The bitterness of it burst out in that last sentence. Then, quietly, he told Amy’s cousin the story of that long-buried youth. When it was done, John Paul said huskily:--

“West, I don’t know what to think of your telling her; but I know what to think of you. And I know what to think of Amy.”

William West said nothing; he took the little note out of his pocket and turned it over and over.

(“He seemed to go to pieces before my eyes,” John Paul told his wife. “I tell you, Kate, I saw him lose his moral grip! Poor West--poor fellow!”)

Mr. Paul sat helplessly looking at his clergyman, until he had a sense of indecency in watching the suffering of this silent human creature. Then he said vaguely:--

“I suppose you want me to clear out? But just tell me; what do you want me to do?”

“Nothing.”

“But don’t you mean to make any effort to bring her to her senses?” burst out the other.

“There’s nothing to be done,” the lover said. “It’s over--don’t you see?”

“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?”

“I haven’t any opinion yet,” said the other man slowly; “and, somehow, I got to thinking--I say, John, after all, what do you make of West’s telling Miss Townsend that matter?”

“I think she didn’t know which side her bread was buttered,” John Paul said gruffly.

“Oh, that’s another question,” the lawyer said. “I think almost any woman is too good for almost any man. I wonder they don’t all think better of it at the last moment, and throw us over!”

“How long have you been married, Gifford?” the older man inquired cynically. “I’ll tell you what Kate says: Kate says if Amy could throw him over, she ought to have had the chance to. So she thinks West ought to have told her.”

“That’s like saying, if there is a chance of breaking your neck by taking some preposterous leap, take it,” the lawyer commented. “But as I look back at it now, and see how it has aged Billy, and--well, hardened him a little, I think--it seems such an unnecessary calamity; such a blunder! And yet”--

“Kate has views about heredity, and all that sort of thing,” Mr. Paul explained. “She says a woman has a right to say her children shan’t have a--shady character for a father. That was too much for me; I don’t generally contradict my Boss; it isn’t peaceful. But that was too much for me! Billy West shady! I gave my wife a piece of my mind. I tell you, Woodhouse, women are hard.”

“Well, but there’s something in that,” the lawyer protested. “A woman has not only a right, but a duty, to think of her children, and a possible moral taint”--

“Moral grandmother!” John Paul broke in; “West is one man in a hundred. I think he’s well rid of Amy: I told him so at the time. Why, look here; a man who has not repented of his sin has no inclination to confess it. And, having repented and made reparation, confession becomes a mere matter of expediency. Why, good heavens, Gifford! is there to be no escape from sin? What’s all this talk about forgiveness mean, if we’ve got to rake up the past and agonize over it as long as we live? Isn’t there any statute of limitation in things spiritual? I don’t believe any large mind dwells on its sins, any more than on its virtues! And yet,” he ended, suddenly cooling, “I swear it is a difficult question, the telling or not telling the girl you are going to marry.”

“If you bring it down to expediency, it’s simple enough,” Gifford Woodhouse said; “it was obviously inexpedient. Even if she had married him, and simply remembered, would either of them have been any better off? Would any end have been subserved by putting such painful knowledge on her conscience as well as his own? It was not as though there was a lady ‘with nine small children and one at the breast’ somewhere round the corner in the Past, who might turn up some day. That sort of sin affects the relation of the man and woman, and it may be simple prudence to confess. Though I think there is a question, even there. But in this case expediency, you might even call it unselfishness, would make him hold his tongue. The only thing is, perhaps there is something higher than expediency?”

They had reached Mr. Paul’s door; he pitched his cigar into the street and pulled out his keys, shaking them on the end of their chain.

“You mean, abstractly, is it right or wrong, under circumstances like these, where no third person is to be cleared or benefited, to tell? Does honor demand confession?”

“Yes,” said the vestryman; “was it a duty to speak, or a duty to be silent?”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Was West a fool or a saint?” insisted the younger man.

“I’ll be hanged if I know,” said the senior warden.

THE HOUSE OF RIMMON

I

THE Rev. Silas Eaton was dead.

It was May, and the little orchard behind the parsonage was like a white and perfumed cloak flung on the shoulder of a bare hillside which was, all the rest of it, rocky pasture. Under the trees, and in the shelter of the stone walls, the grass was growing green. The apple blossoms were just beginning to fall; in any breath of wind single petals, white, stained outside with crimson, came down in flurries, like gusts of warm and aromatic snow. There was a stir of life everywhere. In the parsonage garden crown imperials had pushed their strong stalks through the damp earth, and peonies were reaching up long slender arms, each with its red curled fist of leaves, reluctant to expand until certain of the sun. The ground was spongy beneath the foot, and there were small springs bubbling up under every winter-bleached tuft of last year’s grass. The air, full of the scent of earth and growing things, was warm and sweet, yet with an edge of cold--the sword of frost in a velvet scabbard.

Life--life: and in the upper chamber of the parsonage the master lay dead.

One of the children had put a bunch of apple blossoms on the table at the head of the bed. They were not appropriate--the soft, rosy flowers beside the hard face there on the pillow; the face with its thatch of gray hair over the narrow, domelike brow, seamed and cut with wrinkles; the anxious, melancholy lips set in such icy and eternal indifference--the face of the religious egotist, stamped with inexorable sincerity, stern and cold and mean. Not a father’s face. But his daughter had put her handful of snowy flowers on the pine table, their little gnarled black stems thrust tightly down into a tumbler of water. And then she went tiptoeing out of the silent room. She heard her mother’s little, light voice downstairs in the parlor, and Elder Barnes’s low, respectful murmur in response. They were “making the arrangements.” Esther’s heart stood still, not with grief, but with misery at the strangeness of it all--her silent, meek, obedient mother saying what should or what should not happen to--father!

“And, Mr. Barnes, if it will not be a trouble, will you find out for me how much it would cost to send a telegram to my brother in Mercer?”

Esther, leaning over the banisters in the upper hall, opened her lips with astonishment. A telegram! It gave the child a sense of the dreadful importance of this May day as nothing else had done. The thought of the expense of it came next, sobering that curious sense of elation which is part of bereavement.

“Mother oughtn’t to do that. It will cost--oh, it will cost at least a dollar!”

This fifteen-year old Esther had a certain grim practicality, born of a childhood in a minister’s family on five hundred dollars a year. A dollar! And that uncle in Mercer, whom she had never seen, who had quarreled with her mother because she married her father, and who was so rich and powerful (according to a newspaper paragraph she had once read)--this uncle, who had had no connection with them in all these years--what was the use of wasting a dollar in telegraphing him? She meant to say so; and yet, when she went downstairs, after Elder Barnes had gone, and found her little mother standing at the window, looking blankly out at the garden, there was something in the mild, faded face that kept the girl silent. She came up and put her strong young arm about her, and kissed her softly.

“Mother, won’t you lie down?”

“No, dear; I am not tired. Mr. Barnes has been very kind in telling me what must be done. I do hope everything will be as--_he_ would wish.”

They did not speak for a little while, and then Esther said, in a low voice, “Mother, I don’t want to worry you, and--and perhaps it’s very soon to speak of it, but have you thought at all of what is going to become of us?”

Her mother put up her hand with a sort of shiver. “No, no; not yet. We mustn’t talk of that yet. Oh, Esther, he is dead! Poor Silas--poor Silas!” She caught her breath like a child, and looked up at her tall daughter in a frightened way.

Esther nodded and cried a little; then she wiped her eyes, and said, hesitating: “You’re going to get a crêpe veil, aren’t you, mother, and a black dress? And I think I ought to have a black dress.”

“We haven’t any money for new clothes, Essie,” Mrs. Eaton answered tremulously.

“But I think we ought to wear black,” Esther protested. “It isn’t proper not to.”

The other sighed with anxiety. “I don’t see how we can. He would not wish us to waste the money.”

They were very intimate, these two; for each had found the other a shelter from the fierce integrity which had ruled the family life. And now instinctively they nestled together, panting and chirping like two frightened birds, and saying to each other, “_He_ would wish this, or that.”

But he was dead, and the face of life was suddenly changed to them both. The withdrawal of the dominant righteous will of husband and father made an abrupt silence in their lives--a silence which was as overwhelming in its way as grief. To the mother it was as though having been borne helplessly along on some powerful arm, she had been suddenly set down on her own feet, and bidden to lead and carry others. Esther’s frightened question, “What is going to become of us?” echoed in her ears like a crash of bewildering sound. She had no answer; all she knew was that she must take care of the children; work for them; fight for them--poor little weak creature!--if necessary. She was thirty-five, this mother, but she looked much older. Once she must have been pretty; one knew that by the startled softness of her hazel eyes and the delicately cut pale lips; but her forehead, rounded like a child’s, was worn and full of lines, and her whole expression so timid and anxious and deprecating that one only thought of what her life must have been to cut so deep a stamp on such gentle and vague material. It had been, since her marriage, a very uneventful life, its keenest excitement the making both ends meet on her husband’s salary. Before that there had, indeed, been the keen and exciting experience of marrying in opposition to her father’s command, and being practically disowned by her people. She was Lydia Blair, a girl of good family, gentle and dutiful, as girls were expected to be thirty years ago--one of those pleasant girls who let their elders and betters think for them, and are loved as one loves comfortable and inanimate things. And then, suddenly, had appeared this harsh, fiery, narrow New England minister, of another denomination, of another temperament--for that matter, of another class; and she had developed a will of her own and married him. Why? Everybody who knew her asked, “Why?” Perhaps afterwards she herself asked why--afterwards, when he became so intent upon saving his own soul that he had no time to win his children’s love or to make love to his wife. By the time he came to die, very likely he had forgotten he ever had made love to her. He called her “Mrs. Eaton,” and he was as used to her as he was to his battered old desk or his worn Bible. But when he came to die, he lay in his bed and watched her as he had not done these fifteen years; and once he said, when she brought him his medicine, “You’ve been a good wife, Mrs. Eaton;” and once, “You’re very kind, Lily.” But this was at the end, and the doctor said his mind was wandering. And then the end had come, in the spring night, towards dawn; and now he was lying still, as indifferent to the soft weather, the shower of apple blossoms, the two children whispering about the house, the wife staring, dry-eyed, out into the sunshine--as indifferent as he always had been.

Well, well; he was a good man, they said; and now he had gone to find the God whom he had defamed and vilified under the name of religion, imputing to Him meanness and cruelty and revenge--the passions of his own poor human nature.

And may that God have mercy on his soul!

II

Robert Blair came into the dining-room, holding the “dollar telegram” in his hand. His wife looked up at him, smiling.

“It is really shameful the way business pursues you! I am going to tell Samuel to burn all dispatches that come here. Your office is the place for those horrid yellow papers.”

“It isn’t business this time, Nellie; it’s death.”

“Oh, Robert!”

“Oh,” he hastened to explain, “it’s nothing that touches us. My sister Lydia’s husband is dead. You have heard me speak of my sister Lydia, haven’t you? It was long before your day, you baby, that she married him. Ah, well, what a pretty girl she was!” He sat down, shook his head when the man offered him some soup, and opened his napkin thoughtfully. “Well, he’s dead. He was a most objectionable person”--

Mrs. Blair looked at the butler’s back as he stood at the sideboard, and raised her eyebrows; but her husband went on, a wrinkle like a cut deepening on his forehead:--

“My father forbade it--did I never tell you about it?--but Lydia, who had always been a nonentity, suddenly acquired a will, and married him. My father never forgave her. She evidently didn’t care for any affection that didn’t include him, and cut herself off from all of us. Of course I’m sorry for her now; but I don’t feel that I have anything to reproach myself with.” He tapped the table with impatient fingers, and told the butler that he didn’t want his claret _boiled_. “Haven’t you any sense, Samuel? You’re a perfect fool about wine; here, throw that out of the window, and get me a fresh bottle!”

Mrs. Blair was a beautiful young woman, who, two years before, had married this irascible, successful, dogmatic man, and (so Mercer said) could wind him round any one of her pretty jeweled fingers whenever she wanted to. He certainly was very much in love--and so was she, though her particular world never believed it, alleging that she was not indifferent to the loaves and fishes.