“You actually believe in a priest!” he said gayly. “We shall make a good Catholic of you yet.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” Winterfield replied, with a touch of his quaint humor. “I respect the men who have given to humanity the inestimable blessing of quinine--to say nothing of preserving learning and civilization--but I respect still more my own liberty as a free Christian.”
“Perhaps a free thinker, Mr. Winterfield?”
“Anything you like to call it, Father Benwell, so long as it _is_ free.”
They both laughed. Father Benwell went back to his newspaper. Winterfield broke the seal of the envelope and took out the inclosures.
The confession was the first of the papers at which he happened to look. At the opening lines he turned pale. He read more, and his eyes filled with tears. In low broken tones he said to the priest, “You have innocently brought me most distressing news. I entreat your pardon if I ask to be left alone.”
Father Benwell said a few well-chosen words of sympathy, and immediately withdrew. The dog licked his master’s hand, hanging listlessly over the arm of the chair.
Later in the evening, a note from Winterfield was left by messenger at the priest’s lodgings. The writer announced, with renewed expressions of regret, that he would be again absent from London on the next day, but that he hoped to return to the hotel and receive his guest on the evening of the day after.
Father Benwell rightly conjectured that Winterfield’s destination was the town in which his wife had died.
His object in taking the journey was not, as the priest supposed, to address inquiries to the rector and the landlady, who had been present at the fatal illness and the death--but to justify his wife’s last expression of belief in the mercy and compassion of the man whom she had injured. On that “nameless grave,” so sadly and so humbly referred to in the confession, he had resolved to place a simple stone cross, giving to her memory the name which she had shrunk from profaning in her lifetime. When he had written the brief inscription which recorded the death of “Emma, wife of Bernard Winterfield,” and when he had knelt for a while by the low turf mound, his errand had come to its end. He thanked the good rector; he left gifts with the landlady and her children, by which he was gratefully remembered for many a year afterward; and then, with a heart relieved, he went back to London.