The Wisdom of Fools. Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

dropped a little, and the color came up into her face, “where people love each other, they have a right to unhappiness.”

      “Listen to Amy clamoring for unhappiness!” John Paul commented. “Don’t worry, my child; you’ll get your share. There’s enough to go round, I’ve noticed.”

      Mrs. Paul laughed, but a note of reality had come into the careless talk that gave her a sense of being a third party.

      “John, you are flippant,” she said; “come, let’s leave these two poor things alone; they’re dying to get rid of us. And besides, if Amy is going to confess her sins since she was one year old, it will take time.”

      “That I consider a most uncalled for reference to my twenty-seven years,” Amy retorted; “and besides, I’ve two more notes to write.”

      “And I must go home,” William West said, rising in a preoccupied manner.

      “Why—but I thought you were going to stay to dinner!” Mrs. Paul protested, with dismay.

      “Oh, you must stay to dinner,” Amy urged.

      But her lover was resolute. Nor did he, as usual, try to lure her out into the hall that he might make his adieus. He said good-night, stopped a moment to discuss with his senior warden something about the appropriation for repairs at St. James, and then, with a sober abstraction deepening in his face, went home through the delicate June dusk, which was full of the scent of the roses that grow behind the garden walls of the old-fashioned part of Mercer.

III

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      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