James Whitten arrived in Hatherton at the ripe old age of seventeen, on the heels of a romance doomed to failure, torn between thrall and indignation of the woman he loved and the world that had rejected their companionship.

He was sixteen he’d first asked her favor. Schoolfellows, they met on streetcorners after the last bells rang. She always arrived first, books in hand, forgotten at her side or clutched protectively to her chest as she looked around for his cropped brown hair and burgeoning whiskers. She was at every instant apprehensive, in part for fear of being caught, and in equal part that he would not appear, and leave her stranded on the streetcorner surrounded by her indifferent comrades. To his credit, this second fear was never realized.

Together they would walk to ice-cream shops, picnic tables in nearby parks, or to secluded shady places behind walls and under bushes. As they walked he would chastely carry her books in his left hand as she walked at his right, their hands dangling to tentatively touch at the slightest misstep, coloring both their faces as they idly chatted of their classes and their teachers.

When they reached their destination, wherever it turned out to be, they lay on the grass or stone or sand, books abandoned beside them, and he would gently kiss her on the cheek, on the neck, and on the lips, while she acquiesced to the softness of his touch, even allowing herself to be wrapped up in his arms, carried away by his scent and his words of tender admiration. He told her he loved her again and again, while she blushed, uncertain. He spoke of marriage, of commitment, of children: his voice, silent during all the days of lessons and through the evenings as his sisters commanded his mother’s attention, would not cease in her ears, whispering, chanting, even shouting his professions of love while she shushed him, laughing, and drawing him back to the ground in another quieting kiss.

And yet his fervor frightened her at times, as when he first summoned her to her window on a moonlit night, hissing her name from the ground through her open window into her ears when summer arrived, with all the listlessness and youthful devilry it brought. She would not speak out at first, committed as she was to preserving the fragile peace of her household, but the young James Whitten turned her responsibilities against her, convincing her that she deserved more than her father’s strict rule, that if he would merely let her court in peace, there would be no need for secrecy. Again she acquiesced, and he guided her down the trellis from the eaves, carrying her in his arms those first few steps away from the darkened house and the sleeping family inside, while her suspicions melted and her arms tightened around his gently sloping neck. He told her that night that what they did could not be wrong, that it felt too right to be sinful as she may have first supposed. He preached to her that happiness was the measure of goodness in the world, and the glow in her face and his provided all the evidence necessary to prove the righteousness of his claim.

And perhaps, if it were true that feeling alone is the measure of all things, the story would hang there in blissful sacrosanctity. But fate is cynical, and God a realist, and when one morning her retching disturbed her father’s preparations for church, the relative morality James Whitten assured her of, disintegrated before the force of fact.

I do not blame the father, or rather I understand his actions. There was no fading glow in his mind of past nights’ romances. Nor were there any long speeches of romantic righteousness to ring in his ears as he picked his weeping daughter from the floor. Love may be conceived in innocence, but children can only be conceived in sin without wedlock’s consummation, and to the father this could only mean a betrayal unlike any he had ever known. This was a violation of those principles so fundamental they need not be spoken, and while I do not know if he ever actually consulted his daughter about the possible consequences of these solemn, self-damning actions, neglected perhaps out of propriety, or on the assumption that his wife would educate her according to his standards, the poor girl became familiar with these consequences all-too-quickly.

She slapped the young James Whitten the following day at the street-corner where they met, and while he searched her face, thick with makeup to disguise her bruises, she told him only that he was wrong, and that she had confessed everything; her father would be coming for him soon.

Whether or not he had a right to be afraid, when all the assumptions of a young boy’s mind are flipped unceremoniously on top of themselves, dangers appear magnified, troubles seem impossible to resolve, and even the most drastic actions seem reasonable in response. He fled, and while the girl gradually recovered from her injuries, she grew less and less composed as James Whitten’s disappearance went unresolved. The child was miscarried several months later, but I know nothing more than that.

For the Rector’s sake, I suspect that, if given several days in the woods to reevaluate his situation, reason would have prevailed over paranoia and despair, but this luxury was never realized. Mere hours after his beloved spurned him, as the sun rose after a sleepless night, he found himself on the outskirts of Hatherton, and was discovered by the present church father on his way to the town square. In Hatherton Whitten found the sanctuary he sought, and, furthermore, he found the unique opportunity of respect that he had, until that time, never known except in his relationship with the beloved girl. The preacher took him in as a ward and companion in the dark, empty cathedral. He taught the boy the Bible and the Lives and Whitten found in them the moral grounding necessary to replace his own after the upheaval that had taken place.

Whether he had been changed by the events of his arrival, or whether it had simply been latent in his personality the whole time, the boy proved a dedicated servant of the church. He tended the father with the care and affection he had boldly expressed only weeks ago, but now sedately, and without any such profession. He grew to take great joy in the simple, tedious tasks that the father was growing too frail to do himself: cleaning the sacraments and sweeping the steps, washing the circular stained-glass window from the loft above the sanctuary, and ringing the bells of Sunday mass, all with the same reverence and care he had once used to carry his beloved across the lawn of her father’s house.

In these things I wonder if he is not more like the father of the girl, rather than her passionate suitor.

Whatever his motivations, whatever his sympathies, he did not ever return to the outside world and his lost beloved. As the father grew more feeble and the community more partial to the quiet, respectful young ward, he realized that his duties were there, among his parishioners; to their problems, vices, and needs. When the old father died, he assumed his duties with grace and humility, never once sure of his own fitness to the cause.

And yet, perhaps, it is this very doubt that consoled him in the quiet, lonely nights in his cottage behind the churchyard. For if conviction was truly his undoing, as a bruised young woman once told him, years ago, then there could only be security in doubt – unless this, too, was a faulty conviction.