“Yes.”
“That is broken off—if it were ever really on. It was a great mistake for both of us—a tragical one for her, poor child, a ridiculous one for me. My only consolation is that it was a mistake and no more; but I don’t conceal from myself that I might have prevented it altogether if I had behaved with greater wisdom and dignity at the outset. But I’m afraid I was flattered by an illusion of hers that ought to have pained and alarmed me, and the rest followed inevitably, though I was always just on the point of escaping the consequences of my weakness—my wickedness.”
“Ah, there is something extremely interesting in all that,” said the old minister thoughtfully. “The situation used to be figured under the old idea of a compact with the devil. His debtor was always on the point of escaping, as you say, but I recollect no instance in which he did not pay at last. The myth must have arisen from man’s recognition of the inexorable sequence of cause from effect, in the moral world, which even repentance cannot avert. Goethe tries to imagine an atonement for Faust’s trespass against one human soul in his benefactions to the race at large; but it is a very cloudy business.”
“It isn’t quite a parallel case,” said Colville, rather sulkily. He had, in fact, suffered more under Mr. Waters’s generalisation than he could from a more personal philosophy of the affair.
“Oh no; I didn’t think that,” consented the old man.
“And I don’t think I shall undertake any extended scheme of drainage or subsoiling in atonement for my little dream,” Colville continued, resenting the parity of outline that grew upon him in spite of his protest. They were both silent for a while, and then Colville cried out, “Yes, yes; they are alike. I dreamed, too, of recovering and restoring my own lost and broken past in the love of a young soul, and it was in essence the same cruelly egotistic dream; and it’s nothing in my defence that it was all formless and undirected at first, and that as soon as I recognised it I abhorred it.”
“Oh yes, it is,” replied the old man, with perfect equanimity. “Your assertion is the hysterical excess of Puritanism in all times and places. In the moral world we are responsible only for the wrong that we intend. It can’t be otherwise.”
“And the evil that’s suffered from the wrong we didn’t intend?”
“Ah, perhaps that isn’t evil.”
“It’s pain!”
“It’s pain, yes.”
“And to have wrung a young and innocent heart with the anguish of self-doubt, with the fear of wrong to another, with the shame of an error such as I allowed, perhaps encouraged her to make—”
“Yes,” said the old man. “The young suffer terribly. But they recover. Afterward we don’t suffer so much, but we don’t recover. I wouldn’t defend you against yourself if I thought you seriously in the wrong. If you know yourself to be, you shouldn’t let me.”
Thus put upon his honour, Colville was a long time thoughtful. “How can I tell?” he asked. “You know the facts; you can judge.”
“If I were to judge at all, I should say you were likely to do a greater wrong than any you have committed.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Miss Graham is a young girl, and I have no doubt that the young clergyman—what was his name?”
“Morton. Do you think—do you suppose there was anything in that?” demanded Colville, with eagerness, that a more humorous observer than Mr. Waters might have found ludicrous. “He was an admirable young fellow, with an excellent head and a noble heart. I underrated him at one time, though I recognised his good qualities afterward; but I was afraid she did not appreciate him.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said the old man, with an astuteness of manner which Colville thought authorised by some sort of definite knowledge.
“I would give the world if it were so!” he cried fervently.
“But you are really very much more concerned in something else.”
“In what else?”
“Can’t you imagine?”
“No,” said Colville; but he felt himself growing very red in the face.
“Then I have no more to say.”
“Yes, speak!” And after an interval Colville added, “Is it anything about—you hinted at something long ago—Mrs. Bowen?”
“Yes;” the old man nodded his head. “Do you owe her nothing?”
“Owe her nothing? Everything! My life! What self-respect is left me! Immeasurable gratitude! The homage of a man saved from himself as far as his stupidity and selfishness would permit! Why, I—I love her!” The words gave him courage. “In every breath and pulse! She is the most beautiful and gracious and wisest and best woman in the world! I have loved her ever since I met her here in Florence last winter. Good heavens! I must have always loved her! But,” he added, falling from the rapture of this confession, “she simply loathes me!”
“It was certainly not to your credit that you were willing at the same time to marry someone else.”
“Willing! I wasn’t willing! I was bound hand and foot! Yes—I don’t care what you think of my weakness—I was not a free agent. It’s very well to condemn one’s-self, but it may be carried too far; injustice to others is not the only injustice, or the worst. What I was willing to do was to keep my word—to prevent that poor child, if possible, from ever finding out her mistake.”
If Colville expected this heroic confession to impress his listener he was disappointed. Mr. Waters made him no reply, and he was obliged to ask, with a degree of sarcastic impatience, “I suppose you scarcely blame me for that?”
“Oh, I don’t know that I blame people for things. There are times when it seems as if we were all puppets, pulled this way or that, without control of our own movements. Hamlet was able
