Paul has given a great deal of good advice in her day,” the Rev. Billy remarked meditatively, “and I really think very little harm has come from it.”
“She advised your being called to Mercer,” Amy retorted. “Did you know that?”
“Know it? My dear child! how often have I dined at the Pauls’? Just so often have I heard it.”
“Now, Billy, that’s not very nice in you.”
“I but stated a fact; and I have a high regard for Mrs. Paul. Only, when I think how many girls she has tried to make marry me!—but they would none of them look at me.”
“And in two weeks the opportunity will be gone,” she jeered.
“Poor girls!” the minister commiserated; and was reproved for vanity. Indeed, just because happiness is so serious a thing, they became very frivolous, these two, sitting watching the sunset, and the river. Amy told him a funny story about the parish; he responded by another concerning Tom Reilly, a policeman; which reminded Amy to tell him that poor Tom had had an accident, and hurt his hand.
“But it was very stupid in him,” she added, with a little of that resentful goodness that one sees sometimes in women. “I’m not at all sorry for him, because he deserved it. He had been drinking, and as he went stumbling out of a car, he crushed his hand in the door.”
Her lover was not to be lured into professional comments; he only muttered, “Mauvais quart d’heure”—which made her say indignantly: “Now, Billy, really, that is too much!” and insist that they should go home immediately. “I cannot descend to such levels,” she told him; and was very stern and forbidding when, looking to the right and left, and seeing no man, he begged to be allowed to kiss her.
But this was all froth. Beneath, in the man’s life, were the great tides of love, moving, noiseless and unchangeable, from out the depths of his soul. In the girl’s life it was all shine and perfume and glitter, like flowers blossoming on a rock; beneath, in her heart, was the solid ground of reverence and faith.
II
The two weeks that were to pass before the day that was to be the Day of Days were very full.
To get parish work ahead so that things would run themselves for the month’s absence which had been granted the clergyman was no small undertaking. William West was very busy, and a little preoccupied in his endeavor to put his best thought, not upon his own happiness, but upon committees, or Sunday-school matters, or his assistant’s spiritual anxieties concerning his superior’s indifference to the color of the lectern bookmarks; so it chanced that he saw less of Amy than in the earlier part of their engagement. He had but little time to think of her, and absolutely no time to think of himself.
They were to be married on Thursday. Late Monday afternoon Mr. West, with great timidity, ventured into Mrs. Paul’s drawing-room, with the bold purpose of abstracting his sweetheart for a walk. The project was, of course, promptly crushed.
“As though Amy had any time for that sort of thing!” said Mrs. Paul. “Do you see those presents? She has got to acknowledge every one of them! Amy, your cousin John and I will entertain Mr. West. You can write your notes here, and let him look at you; that’s quite enough for him.”
Amy smiled at him across a barricade of silver bric-à-brac.
“Billy thinks silver picture-frames and brushes and things are a dreadful waste of money,” she said. “Just think how thankful you ought to be, Billy, that I am making our manners for you; you couldn’t say ‘Thank you,’ with truth.”
“Oh, truth,” said John Paul, lounging about the room, with his hands in his pockets—“truth, my dear little cousin, is governed by the law of benefit; didn’t you know that? If it makes the donors feel happy, tell them West has longed for nothing in the world so much as a silver glove buttoner. Now, if you told them the truth, fancy the shock! Ask the Parson.”
“The Parson has no such base and cynical theory,” Miss Townsend responded promptly; “have you, Billy? You don’t think truth is governed by the law of benefit?”
“I think truth-telling is,” he assured her.
John Paul assumed that look of artless and simpering satisfaction which one sees on the countenance of the unprotected male, who, in the bosom of his family, finds himself indorsed by a higher power.
“There, Amy, what did I tell you? I had an instance of it yesterday. I”—
“Oh, here is a third asparagus fork,” murmured Amy; “what shall I say about it?”
“What’s your instance?” said the minister.
“Well, we’ve been looking for an assistant engineer, and there have been the Lord only knows how many applicants. One fellow impressed me very well; he seemed as straight as a string; honest face, thoroughly decent-looking fellow. He was an Englishman, but his references for three years were American. So much the better, of course. I was going to engage him, when, bless my soul, if he didn’t begin to stammer out something about having no references from ‘Home’ (‘’ome,’ he called it), because he ‘’adn’t been over steady,’ but he’d signed the pledge, and ‘he wasn’t afraid of drink any more.’ I didn’t hire him. Now, I call that truth not governed by the law of benefit.”
“You don’t discriminate between being truthful and telling the truth,” said William West. “You hadn’t asked him if he had ever drank. I don’t believe you lost much, in not engaging him, poor fellow.”
“Oh, Billy, I think it was rather fine in him,” Amy protested, looking up from her notes.
“I don’t see anything fine,” the minister said simply. “In the first place, there was a lack of reserve, a lack of privacy, in rushing into confession, which betrays the weak nature. There was also self-consciousness, in dwelling on his sin. And in the third place”—
“This sounds like a sermon: firstly—secondly”—Amy murmured, signing her name to her thanks for the third asparagus fork.
—“in the third place, if the man has reformed, there was an essential untruth in posing as a sinner.”
“Well, I don’t quite agree with that,” began Mrs. Paul.
“He’s right; he’s right,” John Paul declared. “I say, West, suppose we went about confessing some of our college performances?” The senior warden of St. James grinned, but his wife looked displeased.
“I don’t believe you ever did anything very bad, John; but if you did, I think you should have confessed to me.”
“I stole some signs, Kate,” he told her; “can you forgive me?”
Amy, listening, smiling, said with that charming sidewise glance at her lover: “Cousin Kate is quite right. I should never forgive a man who didn’t tell me everything! Billy, come here and confess. Have you ever done anything wicked?”
“We
