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Agreeing, therefore, on the whole, with the reticence of the public man in this matter, we yet feel a certain satisfaction in the robust avowals of Mr. Ernst. Follows his letter of January, 1921: "I am 77 years old, employed as commercial salesman by one of the largest manufacturing companies of its kind in the world, and command a good salary and the confidence of my employers.
Nor, in my dissatisfaction with them, did it give me any uneasiness as it gave me no surprise to find that his brother-officers took less kindly to him. He kept a certain reticence of manner, which either came of a natural shyness or had been ingrained in him at the Roman Catholic seminary.
But, madame, as you are a true woman, believe what I say; for, I repeat, it is the truth." Then, with admirable reticence, even great delicacy, he told the story as Elise had told it, and as convincingly. "I believe you, monsieur," she said frankly, when he had done, and stretched out her hand to him with a sudden impulse of regard. "Now, follow up that unselfishness by another."
To Louise d'Albany, to the woman between whom and himself he boasted that there was never the slightest reticence or deceit, he screwed up the force to tell the tale of that interview only some time later. Alfieri, honest enough to lay bare his own self-degradation, was not generous enough to hide the fact that this self-degradation was incurred out of love for her.
The mystery surrounding her, her reticence, the muttered insinuation dropping from the unguarded lips of Murphy, merely served to render her the more attractive, while her own naive witchery of manner, and her seemingly unconscious coquetry, had wound about him a magic spell, the full power of which as yet remained but dimly appreciated.
Neefit seemed to have lost that discretion for which his friends had once given him credit. On the occasion of his visit to the Moonbeam early in the hunting season he had spoken out very freely among the sportsmen there assembled; and from that time all reticence respecting his daughter seemed to have been abandoned.
She too, perhaps, found it harder to utter to a man than to a woman, and between the strangeness of speaking to one another again, and her shyness and his wonder and delight, it seemed to me unreasonable that poor little Alured's danger was counting for nothing between them, and I turned from the former reticence to the bereaved tigress style, and burst out, "And are we to stand talking here while our boy is in these people's power?"
We are each of us bound to reticence by the piety we owe to those who have been nearest to us and have had a mingled influence over our lives; by the fellow-feeling which should restrain us from turning our volunteered and picked confessions into an act of accusation against others, who have no chance of vindicating themselves; and most of all by that reverence for the higher efforts of our common nature, which commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonising struggles with temptation, in unbroken silence.
Here before him, he felt, lay a man whose personality it was not easy to define, one who might be foolish, or might be able, but of whose character the leading note was reticence, inherent or acquired. Then he took the hand, and said simply: "Pray, say no more about it. I acted on an impulse and some wandering words of yours, with results for which I could not hope.
She had not the exalted ideas about her fellow-creatures which Hester had, but she possessed the rare gift of reticence. She exemplified the text "Whether it be to friend or foe, talk not of other men's lives." And in Rachel's quiet soul a vast love and pity dwelt for these same fellow-creatures. She had lived and worked for years among those whose bodies were half starved, half clothed, degraded.
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