THE CHRISTMAS BISHOP

Sometimes, against the dark faces of the housefronts, window shades were rolled up, like eyelids opening, on home-pictures that reminded the Bishop it was Christmas night
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The Christmas Bishop

BY
WINIFRED KIRKLAND
Author of “Introducing Corinna,” “The Home-Comers,” etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY
LOUISE G. MORRISON

BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1913
By SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
(Incorporated)

THE VAIL-BALLOU CO.,
Binghamton, N. Y.

THE CHRISTMAS BISHOP

PART I

Christmas morning, blue-black, pricked with stars against the Bishop’s window panes. Westbury lay asleep beside its curving river, the great old houses with gardens that ran terraced to the bank, the churches, the college, even the new teeming tenements at the bending of the water, all lay asleep in the Christmas dawning. The Bishop alone was awake, and against the darkness before his eyes pictures raced. He had been a poet once, so long ago that when sometimes they sang his hymns in church he had forgotten they were his, but he still kept the poet’s trick of thinking in pictures during those strangely alert moments between sleep and full awakening. The pictures fell into the march of a poem.

It was a storied city built upon two hills cleft by a valley. On the twin crests towered great palaces and a temple. Where the hills sank toward the north, there were terraced streets and narrow climbing byways. There were markets and booths and all the signs of multitudinous life, but throughout all the place one heard no sound, saw nothing that moved, yet one knew that the whole city throbbed with the pulse-beats of innumerable homes. A gray pall hung low, as if the abrupt Oriental dawn had been arrested; the gray dimmed the marble of the palaces, and dulled the temple gold. In the silent gloom one waited.

One did not know whence he had come, the Child who was suddenly there, in the streets of that city without stars, a sacred city once; but wherever he knocked upon the portal, quickly all within woke to life, and became a teeming, bustling household; again, when he withdrew, all was once more silence and darkness.

He was a tiny child, barefoot and pale, some little lost waif from the mountains who had come seeking his kinsfolk among the homes. So fast he pattered over the pavement that his pale hair and his white tunic streamed upon the wind. His little yearning hands stretched out showed fair as a baby’s in that wintry twilight. Ever and again he knocked and entered, and always, entering, his face flamed with hope, and always, coming forth, he was sobbing, for he found no welcome.

On and on he went, while each black street along which he hurried was stabbed ever and again by the opening and shutting of a ruddy door. In the silence one heard it plain, the heavy sound of a door that closed because it did not know him. At length he had passed the city portals and was mounting the hill-slope that is Golgotha, a form all pale upon the dark, blown hair and robe and pattering feet. There the Child turned, for it seemed he was the little Prince of that city, and all the folk his kin. Rising a-tiptoe he stretched out his hands, cross-wise, to them in love, and suddenly the sun, withheld, leaped kingly above the hills beyond Jordan, and the silent air was full of wings and of voices, the chant of the Christmas angels singing home the Homeless One, and in that flood of light and song all that city knew the Child they had lost their own, forever.

Slowly, before the Bishop’s eyes, that gold radiance dimmed into the bleak gray twilight that was stealing over his room. Sharp as life shall strike at visions came a sound from below that struck the dreamy smile from his lips, leaving a twitching pain; certain sounds had that power of intolerable renewal. A homely enough sound, merely the thud of a lid dropped upon a flour bin, but it seemed now to be a flour bin in a doll-house pantry in their first Rectory, his and Annie’s. He would seek her there before going out to his parish calls. She would be standing with her back to him, hands deep in dough, and would turn to him her cheek, olive that always went rose beneath his kiss. He could still hear the catch of her breath as she whispered good-by, for Annie, deeply joyous, had yet always treated joy a little apprehensively, as if knowing it would not last so very long. Looking back over many years, the Bishop thought how young Annie had been when she died, and Nan had been younger still. Nan! There it was again! That flash of hot pain through his head, followed by a numbing dullness, even stranger to bear. He had felt this several times of late. The Bishop ran a hand over his forehead. He seemed to be floating far, without thought, yet this was not sleep. Slowly, slowly, he drew back, but his thoughts were heavy, not clear. He seemed to lie there waiting, waiting for something. Surely thus he had always waited on Christmas morning. He listened. It would come in a moment. There! A scurry along the hall, the clatter of the door-handle, a rush, a jump, curls, lips, bubbling chuckles, little cold toes to be warmed in his hand! Hear the shouts and the singing of her, feel the pummelling of her little hands!

“Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!” shrilling straight up to the angels! Was she not Christmas joy turned mad, his little girl!

He was full awake now. His lips formed a word. We are very weary of old pain repeated when we whisper out to God like that.

The Bishop wondered why people say that one grows used to loss, and that old age grows dull in feeling. Still he had got used to it, of course. This was Christmas, too; it was quite natural that he should feel it more on Christmas. He must be a little patient then with himself about it, perhaps, on Christmas. Yet when had there been a day when he had not missed them, his own!

The Bishop turned toward the eastward window, and on his gray and beautiful face fell the gray and beautiful morning, for the Bishop was one who had made God a habit, so that he turned to Him instinctively without thinking about it at all. And since also he was a man of quick visual imagination he thought of God quite simply: he saw Him standing there, between the bed and the brightening window, in the form of a young Jewish rabbi. He always stood there, to greet the Bishop’s day. Together they always went about, step matching step, so that the Bishop was never a lonely man. To himself he always thought of the Nazarene as the Friend, because, so he thought, it was by loneliness that Jesus had learned how to love. Since the Bishop always thought in words and in pictures, it seemed to him that the Friend said to him now, “Rise. Let us go forth into the morning. It is Christmas. It is the day of giving.”

While he dressed, the Bishop still knew God standing there, but felt rather than seen, being lost sometimes in mist and dizziness. The spaces in the room were strange; it was a very long journey to the washstand, and the white window squares seemed to advance and then recede. The Bishop could see his brush plainly enough on the bureau scarf, but it was a long time before he could make his hand reach it. He had to smile quaintly at himself at last, for he was sitting on the bed mechanically counting the flower baskets in the worn Brussels carpet, flower baskets that ran diagonally to the chair holding his coat. Groping a little, the Bishop achieved the coat, then stood trembling. Undoubtedly he was ill that morning, but Mrs. Graham should not know it! For he must go out, he must go to church, there was no service in all the year so dear to him as the Christmas communion at St. John’s. He would force his blurring head to go through with it, and Mrs. Graham should not keep him in! Keep him in! A frown twitched on his forehead, an old man’s helplessness at the thought of coddling. Why should a woman he had known but three years be so solicitous over his health, dictating about his rubbers and his socks—he was not ill, nor was he so very old! At that his brow cleared in a sunny flash of amusement, for of course, he was very old, eighty-one, and besides Mrs. Graham was very good to him. Still to-day she must not keep him at home, for to stand once more within the rail offering the chalice to his people had become a deep and blind desire, overmastering all sense of weakness. Besides, there were other matters and grave ones to be seen to, to-day. Somehow—he looked toward the eastward window—the strength would come for the day, as it always came.

Slowly, while he stood looking out into the morning grown rosy now with the coming sun, his head cleared more and more, as he thought about his Westbury as it brightened beneath the Christmas sunrise. Few towns, the Bishop thought, had changed so little in sixty years. He looked out on the same Westbury he had first seen when he had come to St. John’s college as a boy. Stately old River Street with its twin rows of elms still curved to the curve of the river. Each quiet old house had in the rear a terraced wintry garden sloping to the wide and sparkling water. The Bishop knew each of these houses, even as far as Lucy Hollister’s, which was beyond his sight. Lucy still kept the house of her girlhood where the Bishop had first known her, known Lucy and her cousin, Annie. Far beyond Lucy’s house, River Street changed to towering tenements and grimed factories, the place of the strangers, where the Bishop often walked, but wistful and puzzled, for it was this part of Westbury alone that had changed since his boyhood, although even then it had been the place of work-people, for whom St. John’s Southside Mission had been founded. The Bishop stood thinking of the mission.

Well in sight, breaking the row of houses set among their wintry trees, sprang the spire of St. John’s, and beyond its Rectory lay the brown, cube-like buildings of the college above the sweeping river, a small college of mighty men. It was there that the Bishop and his roommate, Barty Judd, had learned to dream dreams. It was the glory of Westbury, the kindly old city, remote, unworldly, that it had set so many young men dreaming. The Bishop smiled to think how proudly Westbury still pointed to its seven bishops, for the spirit of Westbury had not changed in all the sixty years since the founding of the mission. Westbury had given the Bishop, he thought, the most beautiful thing in his life; it was this that brought the light to his face as he thought of the gift he wished to give Westbury in return, to-day, if—if he could! At that “if” his eyes deepened with a sharp and subtle change, then cleared as the passing thought of the day before him yielded to memories, and he saw the afternoon of the laying of the mission corner-stone. As they had walked home together, the Bishop, after long silence, had broken into boyish fire of words, seeing all his life before him. Lucy had listened and answered, but Annie had been silent.

Dreamer as the boy had been, he had never dreamed of coming back one day, long afterwards, and living to be an old, old man in the bishop’s house in Westbury.

The sun was climbing to a golden blaze now, filling with hope the day before the Bishop. He was always a good deal of a child in his Christmas feeling. There was work before him on this Christmas day, in his own house and out of it. Quite simply he closed his eyes a moment, with bowed head, thinking of the Westbury he loved and of three within it, whom he should see that day.

The Bishop’s tall figure swayed a little as he grasped the stair rail, and for an instant his gaze was vague upon the dusky hall, upon the gloomy wall-paper, the threadbare carpet. It was a gray and worn old house in which the Bishop’s soul was harbored. A succession of housekeepers, under the oversight of Mrs. Hollister, kept it in order, but it needs the authority of kinship to change a wall-paper or a carpet. Thus it was that the Bishop’s long hallway was hardly more his own than the pavement outside, or his own dining-room door before which he paused, hardly more his own than the doors along his familiar River Street. His hand lingered on the knob, for, thinking of Mrs. Graham within, and of the testing now of his three years’ hope, he had grown apprehensive and wistful. Then his face flashed firm in a smile, as he looked toward Someone beside him there in the dim hall. That little way of looking toward the Friend with a quick upward smile was one of the Bishop’s habits engendered by solitude. He never meant to betray his thought publicly, yet sometimes wayfarers in the train, on the street, were startled at the sudden passing of strange light across the gray face, making it, as now in the opening doorway, the face of a little child. The Bishop bent toward the black-clad little woman before him the bow that belonged to the days of his youth. Age had stooped his shoulders, but never stiffened their grace, nor that of the sweep of his extended hand. His face—lean, clear-chiselled, blue-eyed, and heavily thatched with white—was ashine with Christmas greeting.

“I wish you a beautiful Christmas!” he said.

Mrs. Graham’s glance met the Bishop’s furtively. She had restless brown eyes beneath a tranquil parting of brown hair, curling and lightly silvered. Her mouth looked as if locked upon discontent. She was a stout, rosy little woman who moved in a heavy, bustling manner. She put her hand into the Bishop’s awkwardly, never having become accustomed to one who shook hands as a morning greeting.

“Merry Christmas,” she murmured perfunctorily, as, in the holiday absence of a maid, she turned toward the business of the Bishop’s breakfast. The raised slide of the dumb-waiter made a gap in the solid paneling of dark cupboards occupying one wall. Like other dining-rooms on River Street, the room had two long windows looking toward the water. There was a wide piazza beyond them, hung with the gnarly ropes of leafless Virginia creeper. It was a dark-wainscoted room, but now the level eastern sun flooded it, and there was a great crimson spot of roses at the Bishop’s plate. The table was set for one, he noticed; when Maria was away, Mrs. Graham insisted on serving him with her own hands, instead of settling comfortably into her usual seat. In the silent room, only the sound of the dumb waiter that creaked and rattled, but the Bishop was waiting to speak, after the long patience of three years. When his breakfast had been set forth to her satisfaction, Mrs. Graham sank upon the edge of a chair near the window, keeping an alert eye on the Bishop’s needs, but having also an air of absence.

“Well,” she burst out at last, “so it’s Christmas again!”

“Yes,” the Bishop smiled, “‘again.’ It comes around pretty often, doesn’t it? This is your third Christmas in Westbury.”

“I wonder how many more I’ll have, in Westbury.”

“Is it such a bad place to spend Christmas in then, Westbury?”

“Bad for me, yes! After Fair Orchard!”

“But I had hoped you had begun to feel at home in Westbury.”

“Me! At home! In Westbury! No, I’ve no place here and never can have. I see that plain enough,—just a housekeeper, anyway! I’ve no place in the place, I mean, like at home! Oh, there’s no harm in Westbury! It’s not as bad as some towns. There’s show here, but it’s not showy; there’s money, but there’s manners, too! Only there’s no heart in the place! How could there be, with Dr. Newbold running the church and Mrs. Hollister running society?”

“They both have hearts, I am sure, Mrs. Graham.”

“Maybe. Not for plain people, or poor people, though. Maybe for you. Although Dr. Newbold—” she broke off sharply, teeth on lip, while her eyes, too full and bright with meaning, changed before the Bishop’s gaze, and she altered her unspoken sentence, concluding, “Dr. Newbold suits the place all right. He don’t suit me, that’s all. It’s kind of spoiled church for me, going to St. John’s, and church in Fair Orchard was such a lot to me. It’s queer when you always hear about Westbury being such a strong church place that it should have spoiled church for me. It’s all right when you preach, of course, Bishop, but it’s something else I’m talking about. It was different at home—oh,” her rosy face darkened savagely, “sometimes it seems as if my church was just another of the things she’s taken from me along with my home and my boy!”

The Bishop closed his eyes an instant, seeking counsel.

“It’s Christmas that upsets me so! Christmas that brings it all back on me so. And then to-day she sent, Florence herself, she sent the baby’s picture on a post-card. It’s signed ‘From Florence.’ You’d think after all that’s happened, she’d have let Dan send it, the first word I’ve had from either of them for three years!”

She rose and filled the coffee cup abruptly. “Well,” she jerked the words out, “Christmas and other days, I’ve got to grin and bear it, being turned out by my son’s wife. But it’s been worse since there was a baby.”

“It’s the baby’s first Christmas,” mused the Bishop.

“Yes, he’s seven months and sixteen days old.”

The Bishop smiled up at her, “May I see him? Where is the picture?”

She laid it before him. The Bishop adjusted his glasses, then removed them to look from the picture to a keen scrutiny of the grandmother’s face.

“Yes,” she answered his look. “You see it then? The baby looks like us, like Dan and me. And I can see Dan’s father in him, too. There’s not a hair of him that looks like the Reynoldses,—that lot!”

The Bishop was examining the photograph minutely. Mrs. Graham looked over his shoulder, but at his next word she moved away again. “That’s his mother’s hand holding him, isn’t it, that shadow under his arm?”

“Yes! His mother’s hand! He looks like us, but he don’t belong to us! He’s hers!”

The Bishop glanced up, “And I suppose he’s also the other grandmother’s.”

“No! Florence has no mother. I’m all the grandmother that baby’s got!”

“I think you never told me that before,” he paused thoughtfully, then looking over to her standing by the window, he said, feeling slowly for words, “So the baby’s mother, that girl out at Fair-Orchard, has had no mother—to go with her—on that way—a woman goes, to bring home, a little child?”

The Bishop’s voice was soft with the awe of many years ago. The grandmother flushed, muttering, “She would not have wanted me. She had Dan.”

The Bishop’s eyelids had fallen, quivering, over his eyes. He was far away; again he watched with Annie, with Nan, as he said, “But men cannot understand. God does not mean them to. Such things are a secret between God and women, like the coming of Mary’s little child. Each mother needs a mother then. It was not—it was not till then that I understood how much my Nan had lost when she lost her mother.”

“It did not live, did it, at all, your daughter’s child?” whispered Mrs. Graham.

The Bishop shook his head, not speaking, thinking of the little waxen loveliness they had laid to sleep with Nan in the hollow of her arm. His lips showed their rare palsied trembling, murmuring, “Both together, Nan and the little one. She had been so well! I was not prepared—” the eyelids of his quiet gray face trembled, then opened on the blue eyes, as he said, “Of course, we know they do not die. They are alive, somewhere where the dreams come true that we dream for our children.” He smiled into her eyes, “For we are great old dreamers, aren’t we, we grandparents?” He raised his hand from the chair-arm, as if it would have pleaded, “But I think each mother needs the grandmother to help her dream. I think she is wanting you now, that Florence out there.”

She faced sharp about, “Florence! Want me!” She looked at him in grim pity at his simplicity. “No, Bishop, Florence don’t want me! No more than I want her! We’re misfits, Florence and me,—worse luck for Dan, and for me, and for the baby, too, now!”

The blue eyes a-twinkle, “And worse luck for Florence, too,” he persisted. “She sent you the picture. Wasn’t it perhaps to say that she wants to show you the baby himself?”

“It’s like you to think that, Bishop, but it’s not like Florence to mean that. I understand Florence! I can still see her face plain, that last morning!”

“You have not seen her face since there was a baby. Perhaps she understands you, too, now. Perhaps she understands, now, what it costs, to give up an only child to anyone.”

“That’s it, of course, that’s what finished me up, her getting Dan, the way she has. I guess I seem pretty mean to you, but Dan was all I had.”

“I think I understand,” the Bishop said quietly.

Arrested by his tone she turned, “Was he good, your daughter’s husband? Did you get on with him?”

“No one is good enough for an only child. Yes, he was good. He—he has been remarried for a long time, you know.” He spoke with long pauses, remembering, “Yes, I got on with him. I should have lost my daughter if I hadn’t. We had one happy year, together. Getting on is hard. But not getting on is harder.”

She did not speak, turned from him again toward the window, intent, musing.

“Isn’t it,” he pleaded, “harder?”

“You didn’t have to,” she spoke chokily, “get on with Florence! Maybe you could, though, you, Bishop. But I couldn’t! You couldn’t maybe understand how I can’t forgive her for all that she’s taken from me,—a man couldn’t maybe understand, even you. It’s the mother working in me. They used to laugh at me over home, and say I mothered all the village. Yet now I can’t get at Dan, nor at the baby. I haven’t anyone to mother, and it seems as if it makes me sort of,” she struck away a tear with an awkward gesture, “sort of smothery!”

His eyes bent on her in sharp intentness, “There is someone for you to mother!” he said.

“Who?”

“Florence!”

“Florence!” her voice hissed.

“Yes!”

Her trembling lips turned hard, “I guess I’d have to forgive her first!”

“Couldn’t you?” he questioned, while the blue eyes grew softly a-shine. “Couldn’t you, to-day? Couldn’t you, for instance, go out to them to spend Christmas, to-day?” His plan, long suppressed, came hurrying forth. “It’s so near, and so easy! Only thirty miles to that baby! The train leaves at ten, you have time. There’s another train back at seven-two. And you needn’t mind about me. I shall be out all day, first a visit I must make, then the service, and afterward I dine with Mrs. Hollister. You are quite free, you see, to go!”

“I’m free enough, yes,” she admitted, “but I haven’t the will to go, that’s all.”

“To the baby?”

“To Florence! It would mean making up with Florence!”

Lips and eyes showed a quick pleading smile as he said, “Isn’t that perhaps what Christmas and babies are for, for making up?”

She was silent, her breast in its tightly hooked black rose and fell. “But people!” she broke forth at length. “Everybody knowing! The village knows I was turned out, and that there’s not been a word between us for three years. I can’t go crawling back now, just because there’s a baby come,—everybody looking on, everybody knowing!”

“It isn’t everybody’s baby. It’s yours, and hers,” then gravely, “I was not thinking of other people. I was just thinking how much she needs her mother, that girl!”

“Florence!” she said, and there were many thoughts in her tone, slow, incredulous.

The Bishop’s eyes grew remote and bright, seeing Florence. He spoke a little dreamily, “She needs you now, and she knows she needs you! She may have been hard once, being young and without a mother. She may have been cruel. It is different now. She does not feel so secure now. They are so afraid for their babies, don’t you remember, always, these little new mothers. There are so many dangers lying in wait for the little men before they’ve got their armor on. There must be advice to give, and care to give—oh, Florence knows how much he needs his grandmother! Go and see. Can’t you? Couldn’t you? I—I’m in such a hurry to have you go!”

“If I could only hold him once, Dan’s baby!”

“Florence’s baby, too,” he corrected gently.

The brief light swept from her face. Her plump comfortable hands were knotted, and her round face drawn into dignity by pain. Her words were grave and final, “The way to that baby is only through Florence, so I can never go. I can never have him.”

Involuntarily the Bishop’s hand went to his temple in a gesture of pain, then instantly was forced down. He hesitated, then at length, “‘Never’ is such a long word,” he said. “Sometimes God says it for us, but don’t—don’t let us ever say it for ourselves! You know,” a passing tremor ran along his lips, “He didn’t let me have the grandchild I hoped for, but don’t—don’t lose having yours. It seems as if I couldn’t let you go on losing,—that. I am in such a hurry somehow to-day. Can’t you go out there to-day, now? Take the baby the Christmas present his mother most wants for him, take him his grandmother!”

She turned on him, intense, “Bishop, do you know what it’s like to make up with a person who’s done you wrong? Do you know what it feels like to forgive? A person who’d hurt you? Where you care most?”

A moment he groped in past experience for the answer, then in a rush of realization it came upon him. He rose a little unsteadily, that he, too, might stand to face her, as she stood by the curtained recess of the window, where the searchlight of the Christmas sun fell relentless on the drawn intensity of her plump face. The Bishop’s lean, corded hands rested on the two ebony knobs of the chair back. He did not notice, nor did she, that he swayed slightly with a passing dizziness.

“Yes,” he answered slowly, thinking of one he soon must see to-day, “I know how it feels. Yes, I have had to learn, how to forgive—where I cared most!”

“How did you make yourself do it? How?”

He would have evaded if he could. “I only know the old way,” he said humbly, for the Bishop was shy in speaking of some things, as one is shy in speaking about any friend in his presence.

“Tell me how!”

“I only know one way,” he repeated simply. “We all get at the truth from different angles, so there may be many ways to learn to forgive, but I can only tell you about the way that I have tried.” The Bishop was so old that often, as now, his eyes showed the reflection of the harbor-lights in view. As always in his sermons, he had now lost, in his very consciousness of their needs, the presence of his audience in the overwhelming Presence of which he forced himself to speak, “The way I have found is to try always to see through His eyes. I think He is always very near us, trying always to lift us to the level of His eyes, so that we can look forth from that point of view. I think He is always trying and trying to say things to us to excuse—the people who have hurt us. If only we could clear our ears to hear Him! If only we could stand at the level of His outlook into souls! Then we should see so much that’s pitiable and excusable, so many handicaps and mistakes, so much to make us sorry for them that we couldn’t help forgiving. He always saw enough in every soul to make Him patient, and if we don’t see enough to make us patient, too, we have to trust His vision and insight, and forgive because He does.

“Yet it is hardest,” the Bishop’s face showed a passing shadow, as he looked inward upon past struggles and forward to that next interview of his Christmas Day, “to forgive those who hurt Him, His work. Yet he forgave even that, upon His cross. When we remember that, I do not know how I—how we—dare not to forgive.” He paused, while his fingers on the black knobs tightened, then the shadow of his face was struck away by the quick sunshine of reassurance. He looked toward Mrs. Graham, “You see,” he said, “it seems to me that if God in all His eternity has no time to be stern, then perhaps we—who have such a little while! have no time for anything but loving. Don’t you,” he pleaded, “don’t you think so, too?”

The ruddiness had paled from her cheeks. She was looking at him with wide, intense eyes.

“That’s your way, Bishop. But it’s what I couldn’t—ever climb up to,—I guess.” She had to fight to speak, against her choking breath, “I’m one of those you’ll have to forgive, I’m afraid, for not doing what you want. I wish I could, on your account. But it don’t seem as if I could make up with Florence. But I can’t bear that you should look like that, Bishop,—disappointed! Don’t, please don’t, mind! It’s just that I’m a mother who’s lost her boy, and wants him back and can’t get him, him and his baby!”

“And yet,” he answered, “they are all there, all ready for you, waiting, wanting you, all there! It is, it is, too bad!”

“Florence!” she whispered.

“Needing and wanting you most of all. Seeing, by the way her little one needs her, how much she needs a mother. Perhaps mothering is your way of forgiving. Couldn’t you try it? Florence has never had a chance, has she, to learn many things, if she has been a motherless girl? Perhaps she did hate you once. I don’t believe she hates anyone now. It’s very hard to hate when there’s a baby in the house. She sent the picture. She needs you. She knows she needs you, for she knows now what a child can miss who has no mother. Let us think of all she has missed, and not be too hard on her, you and I, any more.”

She was silent, one hand tense upon the curtain cord.

“It’s such a good day to go,” he urged, “such a good day to do the unexpected, Christmas! Everyone expects the unexpected, on Christmas.”

A comical smile worked on her set face, “You do, anyway, Bishop!” she said with a catch in the throat.

“I think I did allow myself to expect this,” he answered, “this making-up. Perhaps I expected it because I wanted it so, for I’ve been in such a hurry somehow, about that baby. Why, he’ll be growing up, while we’re still talking. You have three-quarters of an hour,” he glanced at the clock in quick remembrance of the visit to Dr. Newbold before church-time, “and you’ll go?”

He waited.

She was silent still, until she burst out, “I can’t! I’d say ‘yes’ if I could, when you beg me so. But I can’t say it, and I’ve got to be honest with you. I can’t say it!”

Her face, working with sobs she forced down, was too painful to look at, yet it gave no hope.

“I am very sorry,” he said quietly and turning went into the great study adjoining, which faced, like the dining-room, on the veranda and river. Suddenly very tired, he sank into his desk chair, pressing the tips of his fingers to his temples, which had such a painful way of throbbing every little while this morning.

“I did want it very much,” he acknowledged to himself, “very much.” He sat thinking, for some moments, then remembering, rose and went into the hall to put on his overcoat, whispering, “But it happened to Him like this always—always!”

About to go out into the street, he turned back. The dining-room door was shut. He opened it. Mrs. Graham was still standing in the window recess, her forehead pressed to the cooling pane. There was no one to see her face. Common-place, coarse, ugly with tears, lights were trembling across it. “If she needs me,” she was whispering, “if she needs me,—” for a holy thing was being born.

In the doorway, wearing his old cape overcoat, his face like a wistful child’s beneath his silver hair, the Bishop waited.

“You will go?”

She did not hear, nor know. She did not move until she started at a sound, the heavy closing of the outer door.

PART II

The river was a splendor of Christmas sunshine. A flurry of snow had lightly powdered the brown sod beneath the double rows of elms. Few people were abroad. Sometimes a little group of children, eyes and feet a-dance, and cheeks nipped red, went tripping past the Bishop. Older folk passed with hearty, careless greeting, for the stooping figure in the cape overcoat was as familiar and unnoted as the river itself with all its mystery of light. The Bishop had known Westbury so long and so well that he felt that the homes by which he was passing, all bright with holly, were his homes, that he might have stopped anywhere to share the Christmasing. His slowly pacing feet, however, were bent on the old way toward St. John’s Rectory. In the old days the Bishop had always called at the Rectory to greet Barty Judd and his household before church-time, and he still kept to the habit, even though it was so different now at the Rectory.

A flock of sparrows came swooping down through the wintry silence with much chatter, and at the same time there came scudding across the street a little Italian newsboy as shrill and brown as the birds. The Bishop bought a paper, and made the youngster’s smile flash as he paused for a few words in his own tongue. Presently, as he went on, the newspaper dropped from the Bishop’s fingers, as he fell to thinking of that alien colony down below there, where the river curved, Westbury’s strangers. They had come so recently, the factories had sprung up so quickly, that the workers were still the strangers. It is true that the Bishop was well known to those teeming streets as the old man who spoke Italian and who loved babies, but he felt that he had done nothing for these others, really. Eighty years! How barren of accomplishment they looked beneath the searchlight of Christmas! But perhaps there was still time! His step quickened.

As the Bishop passed beneath the shadow of St. John’s church, the chimes clanged forth the ten o’clock hour. He glanced toward the door, thinking how calm and gentle and familiar everything was within. After all, his headache had melted away and nothing was to prevent his presence by the altar on this morning. The quiet of the chancel was restful to his fancy, lying beyond the visit immediately before him.

As he turned up the Rectory steps, tugging slightly on the handrail, the door was flung open, and a tall boy came hurrying out. His thin, fine face was set and black, but a smile played across its frown when he saw the Bishop.

“Good morning, Harry,” said the visitor, “and good Christmas.”

“There’ll be no good Christmas here,” answered the low taut voice, “unless you’ve brought it, Bishop!”

“No trouble here to-day, I hope?”

“Trouble every day, now!” Then remembering dignity, Harry shut his lips, adding more calmly, “Father is not well this morning, Bishop. I am just going out to tell Mr. Edgerton that he does not feel able to be at church.”

“I am very sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,—sorry for mother and Lois! I am glad you’ve come. It will do them good to see you.”

“And may I see your father, too?”

“I think so, if you wish it. I shouldn’t wish it!” Harry murmured darkly, as he turned about to unlock the door he had slammed, calling in a low note of warning to his mother, and then leaving the Bishop with her in the drawing-room. The shades had been pulled down, the holly wreaths looked dull. A little mouse of a girl came out of a shadowy corner, and the mother’s arm went about the child’s shoulders as the two greeted the Bishop. They both had thin dark faces and intense brown eyes. The girl’s hair was dusky and the mother’s silver, above a forehead worn but unwrinkled. The girl’s dress was white and the mother’s clinging gray, and both wore sprays of blood-red holly.

“Christmas joy to you both,” smiled the Bishop.

“And happy Christmas to you, too, Bishop,” said the mother, while Lois took his hat and cane. He tugged helplessly at his overcoat so that they each sprang to pull at a sleeve.

“Thank you. There! Don’t let yourself be eighty, Lois. It’s a sad thing to be older than your overcoat.” Then, seating himself, he continued, “Harry tells me his father is not well to-day. I am very sorry. I have been worried lately about him.”

“We have all been worried. It is hard to understand. I suppose,” Mrs. Newbold smiled wanly, “it is just another case of ministerial nerves, but he suffers very much at times. I wish I could shield him from all worry, but I cannot always anticipate what is going to disturb him. We try, the children and I, but I fear we are very stupid. This morning, for instance—” she broke off, “this morning he felt quite unequal to the Christmas service, yet he is worried at not being there.”

“Edgerton and I will manage the service. Dr. Newbold may be quite at ease about that. I hope—”

A summoning bell from above rang sharply.

Mrs. Newbold started, “Oh, Katie is at church,” she exclaimed. “Run, Lois! No, I’ll go myself!” With fingers upon the portière, however, she paused.

The Bishop rose, an odd little flicker in his eyes. “Suppose I go,” he said, moving toward the hall.

The wife looked at him, fighting for a tremulous smile. “There is nothing the matter really, of course. I shouldn’t let you go up. I know I ought to go. But—” she drew quick breath, concluding, “he’s in the study, Bishop.”

Once again as earlier in the day, the Bishop paused before a closed door. An instant he stood there, hesitant, with bowed head, deeply thoughtful, then he knocked with firm hand.

“Come in, of course,” a voice thundered. “Why else should I ring except for you to come in!”

The Bishop was standing quietly in the doorway. At sight of him, the bulky form flung upon the couch sprang up.

“I—I—beg your pardon. I thought it was the maid, or my wife.”

“It is merely your bishop.”

The Bishop’s quiet length sank into a deep chair. His long slim hands rested calmly upon the leather arms.

Dr. Newbold sat bolt upright upon the couch, darting furtive glances at the Bishop from eyes too blue for his reddened face. His right hand, strong and square, clutched a cushion tensely. The nervous twitching of his lips redeemed from heaviness a face clean-shaven but always bearing the blue-black shadow of a heavy growth of beard. There was a pleasant sweep of brow beneath jet hair.

“I am sorry you find me so upset this morning, Bishop. They perhaps told you downstairs—” then he paused, remembering what they might well have told the Bishop downstairs!

“Harry told me you were ill. I met him going out.”

“I judged that he had gone out. Harry’s sole comment on his father’s headaches is slamming the front door!”

“The youngsters know so little about headaches,” answered the Bishop; “that is the trouble, then, this morning, headache?”

“The headache is constant, back here, incessant. But this morning the trouble is,—a case of everything, as the doctor says.”

“What does the doctor say? We must find some way of setting straight this case of everything.”

“What they all say—nerves, rest, less work, less worry, fewer diocesan committees, fewer dinner parties—in Westbury where dining is a cult, and as venerable and as sacred as the church steeple! I might as well toss over one as the other! Suppose I did turn heretic, and refuse Mrs. Hollister’s invitation for Thursday! Could I preach beneath her withering glances next Sunday?

“Or suppose I gave up my bridge with my Senior Warden. The Church needs more card-playing clergy, he says quite frankly. And I’m inclined to think, Bishop, that it does. A little more humoring of men of our good warden’s type, and perhaps Dr. Judd’s experiences would be less often repeated. Doctors and dinners be what they will—” mockery and worry both played about the heavy flexible lips, “I have the unfortunate close of that rectorate ever before me.”

“You forget!” said the Bishop’s voice, low and keen. There was a tiny fleck of red upon his cheek bones. Dr. Judd’s forced resignation had been a matter of disagreement between the congregation of St. John’s and the Bishop. There was perhaps no connection between the action of the vestry and the fact that Dr. Newbold, immediately called to the parish, had been for years a friend of the Senior Warden, and a prominent co-worker with him in diocesan affairs; the wires of diocesan politics sometimes presented a strange network for feet like the Bishop’s.

The Bishop was silent a moment, for the Rector’s hand, lying square upon the cushion, had recalled to him the days when he had sometimes involuntarily closed his eyes against the sight of his young secretary’s finger nails. It was an exquisitely kept hand nowadays, yet one that looked unhealthily inactive rather than sleek.

“Well,” mused the Bishop, at last, “if one can’t cut out any of these social obligations, how about the committees?”

Pity for the quick start and the flush of hurt pride, made him add instantly, “Not that the committees can spare you. The church needs you, and we should only be sparing you for a little while to save you for bigger service afterwards.”

“I should regret,” replied Dr. Newbold firmly, while glancing down in some embarrassment, “withdrawing from any service to the diocese,—just now.”

“Why just now?”

The Rector lifted his lids for a quick glance, then dropped his eyes again to his uneasy foot, “The affairs of the diocese, as well as those of the church at large, are passing through a critical period.”

“Sufficient to justify the loss of your health?”

“I feel that the diocese needs me, Bishop.”

“It needs us all.”

“Particularly now,” repeated the Rector.

A curious subtlety crossed the cameo clearness of the Bishop’s face, “But do you not feel that perhaps the need for your activity might be even greater later on?”

“You mean—,” Newbold faltered, for simple folk like the Bishop were hard to fathom sometimes, even after twenty years of study.

The Bishop’s smile showed, disarming, “I mean simply, lad—if I may call you that sometimes, on Christmas, say,—that the diocese can’t afford to have you break down. It needs, and will need you, too much for that. Therefore,—let the diocese take care of itself a little while.”

“It’s been doing that too long,” the other broke forth, with the brutality of overwrought nerves.

A shadow passed over the Bishop’s clear, gray face. Quick words caught with odd puckering upon his lips. He leaned his silver head against the high, dark chairback, long silent.

“Is it really so bad as that, Newbold?” he asked at last. “What is it that is wrong?”

“Our finances, for one thing. The treasurer’s last report—”

“There must be finances, I suppose.”

The other smiled his cynical, twitching smile, “If there’s to be a church at all there must be finances.” He spoke with the irritation belonging to many a former discussion.

The Bishop’s inscrutable gaze rested long upon the Rector. “You are thinking, and rightly, that I am saved much because I have good laborers in the field to count the sheaves and the shekels? Believe me, Newbold, I know the value of your work to the diocese and I am sorry for the weariness of it.”

The other’s face cleared in still uneasy relief. “I do not feel that I can withdraw from any office in the diocese, in the church, however small my service.”

“It is not small. You are the most prominent man in the diocese. The most active. The most influential.”

The other flushed with pleasure, yet regarded his guest enigmatically. “Those are cheering words, Bishop, for a day like this, of discouragement and—of pain.” His hand went to the throbbing disc at the back of his neck, as he added abruptly, “If what you say is true, Bishop, I am perhaps paying the price.”

“I am afraid,” answered the Bishop gently, “that you are.”

“One doesn’t expect the strings to snap at forty-five!” Newbold said querulously. “I could have swung a sledge once! I could still! Yet—it makes me wonder—I have wondered lately—what is the secret of your vitality, Bishop.”

The flicker of a smile on the Bishop’s lips, “Yet I had thought, Newbold, that you did not think so highly of my vitality—that you thought it an ebbing flood, a year or two ago.”

The other flushed to the brow.

“It was for your own sake, Bishop, to save you the wear and tear of constant travel, constant work, that I urged upon the convention the election of a coadjutor.”

“I wish you had done it not merely for my sake, but for the sake of the diocese and of the church.”

“It was for that, too,” Newbold murmured.

“It was at any rate not for my own sake that I refused to have an assistant,” the Bishop went on. “If I could have trusted the choice of my clergy! It is easy and natural, to choose the most popular, the most prominent. A bishop’s diocese is dearer than perhaps any one of his clergy can understand. It is my little piece of God’s world, it is my Westbury in large.

“And my ways are the old ways. My assistant’s might have been the new.” He paused a moment chin on hand, then looked up quickly, “What are the new ways?” he asked. “For I suppose my successor will introduce them.”

Newbold warmed instantly, moistening his twitching lips, “The ways first of all of economical administration. The church must show itself a good business if we want business men to respect it.”

“Do we?”

“Do we not?” Nervous lightnings leaped to Newbold’s eyes. “These are not days of sentimental idealism, of faiths that float in air. To-day a man wants to see his money’s worth in the church as well as out of it. The church,” he brought a tense fist down upon the cushion, “has become a business proposition!”

The Bishop’s face was intent on Newbold, yet inward and remote. Then the blue eyes smiled, “Oh, but not in Westbury!” he pleaded. “We are not money-mad in Westbury!”

“Because you have so much money! Have always had! Yet the purse-strings are the heart-strings in Westbury as elsewhere. Instance my vestry and the Southside Mission. Closed, three weeks ago. Westbury is wealthy but not wasteful. The mission was unsuccessful, therefore to be eliminated from the items of our expenditure. The need of St. John’s, economical organization, is merely an example of the needs of the diocese, and of the church at large.”

“I think I was not, was I, officially told of the action of the church, in closing the mission?”

The Rector stirred uneasily, then looked up with boyish directness, “I was remiss, Bishop, and I acknowledge it. But I knew the matter would need full explanation for you, and to be frank, I’ve postponed a good many things of late, simply because I felt paralysed before them. I’m all out of sorts, not myself at all. I can’t tell what’s the matter with me.”

The Bishop, noting the sudden hysterical flabbiness of the whole face, recalled the man to firm thought.

“The mission is permanently closed, then? That seems to me sad news for Christmas morning.”

“Believe me, Bishop, I understand your feeling about it. I, too, regret the closing of the mission. I’ve positively enjoyed my work down there.”

“I should think that you might have found the mission work almost restful after the other sort.”

“It was restful. Strangely! They speak out down there, act out, too. The Southside caused me no night-long guessing, like my neighbors here. Yet I had no time for the mission, and lately no money either, for the work has become unpopular, quite naturally.”

“Naturally?”

“I mean the factories and the foreigners have obscured the native population for whom the mission was organized. Social conditions were different a few years ago. It was perfectly possible then for prominent members of St. John’s to work at the mission and yet preserve all the decencies of class distinction. The church would hardly expect a man of my Senior Warden’s type to organize clubs and classes for his own factory hands!”

“Yet might not Christianity expect it?”

“In these days, Bishop, I fear, Christianity and the church are two totally different propositions!”

“You have not lost your power of frankness, Newbold!”

A sudden shadow dropped over Newbold’s face. “Have I not?” he questioned himself darkly, then louder, “With you, Bishop, it is always curiously hard not to say what one thinks. Yet I don’t wish you to misunderstand me. I seem to want to be understood this morning. And you’re the only person in the universe, I believe, who’d take the trouble. It’s not, then, that I don’t myself believe the principles of the Christian religion.”

A smile, infinitely sad and subtle, passed over the Bishop’s lips. “Since you are a minister of the Gospel,” he said gently, “one might hope that you believe it.”

“I have come to believe a good bit of it.”

“To believe enough, lad?”

The Christmas bells had begun again. The voices of the churchgoers sounded on the clear air, but the Christmas visitor sat unheeding.

The Rector’s voice was rasped with the tension of self-defense. “Unfortunately for his health and happiness, a minister of the Gospel has much more to think about than what he believes. He has to think what his own congregation is going to allow him to say and to do; he has to think what the church at large is going to allow him to say and to do. He has to think of the success of his own parish, and of the church, and of himself. All three must please the public or fail. Now my policy—”

“Yes,” the Bishop commented quietly, “your policy? A man of growing influence, like yours, would naturally have outlined for himself his creed and his conduct.”

“My conduct, assuredly, yes. It has been my endeavor ever since I entered the priesthood, and will always be my aim, to establish respect for the church, and its clergy, in the community, and in the world at large.”

“And by what methods?”

“The same that prevail in other organizations, sound business system, and the establishment of social dignity. We can’t expect our young men to be attracted to the ministry unless we can show them something in it worth getting,—they naturally want to get out of it reputation, success, social recognition, as in other professions.”

“You have found those things yourself,” the Bishop’s tone was half comment, half question.

“Yes,” answered Newbold, straightening, “I believe I can say that I have found those things. I started at least without them, as you must well remember—I was a raw enough youngster when I first came to you in Westbury—it is humorous to recall—” he laughed a sharp nervous laugh, then grew instantly grave, “I didn’t have much in those days, but I did have health.”

“Yes,” the Bishop answered, “you did have,” he paused oddly—“health!”

“I suppose, if the term had not been so much abused that I might truthfully call myself a self-made man. The church has done much for me. I am grateful,—with reservations! That is why I feel that in spite of these diabolic nerves of mine I must go on, must serve the church, the diocese, in its need.”

“Yet you feel,” asked the Bishop wistfully, “that you cannot serve the Southside Mission?”

Sharp sagacity instantly controlled Newbold’s garrulous nerves, “That was a principle of simple common sense, such as might well be applied to other die-away mission chapels in many a parish.”

Very low the other voice, and far away, “Yet the poor are to have the Gospel preached to them.”

“The parent church is open to them,” Newbold answered almost with petulance, “here as elsewhere.”

“You mean,” the tone was strange, “that it would be your policy to close other missions, in other churches, throughout the diocese?”

“It would be my policy,” replied Newbold, setting his heavy jaw, “to cut off all waste until we get our diocesan treasury out of debt. The church’s one foundation,” he added with that daring cynicism that delighted St. John’s in his sermons, “is at present sound finance.”

It was a buffet across the Bishop’s face, making Newbold instantly protest, “It is not the mere money. It is the deep unpopularity of such missions as the Southside with such congregations as St. John’s. Am I to go against my vestry and retain my position? Am I to be a Dr. Judd?”

“You are afraid?”

“Afraid! Impossible! For a man of my make-up,” he smiled in honest amusement, wetting his lips, “I merely have the sense not to become voluntarily unpopular. What can a man do in the face of unpopularity? His hands are tied. He is helpless.”

The room and the man before him sank like a picture curtained from the Bishop’s sight. With wide strange eyes he saw another picture. He was unconscious of his words, “His hands were tied, in the face of unpopularity! Yet He preached the Gospel to the poor,—and to the rich, to the poor rich!”

There was a long uncomfortable silence, during which the Bishop rested his head against the chair-back, waxen eyelids closed. Newbold studied the silent, sculptured face so long that at last for pure uneasiness he faltered, “I own, Bishop, that I’m no idealist.”

The Bishop opened far, clear eyes, “What are you?”

There was a long pause, then still in that far, clear voice, speaking quite to himself the Bishop said, “Yet you will be—”

The room, embrowned, closed against the Christmas sun, dusky with many books, held the two men, who faced each other as once in a lifetime men may.

The Bishop completed his own sentence, “You will be—my successor!”

It was quite silent now, for the bells had ceased and the chat of church-goers. The chancel of St. John’s was only a stone’s throw from the chair where the Bishop sat, yet it was far from him, the chancel with its peace. But he could still get to church, although late, in time for the communion. One more Christmas sacrament was before him, if only he could hold his brain clear and his body taut, through one short hour more, against the sudden blurring pain in his head.

The silence of the study still quivered with the Bishop’s last words, “My successor!”

Newbold sat facing the fact never before so clearly stated by anyone, not even by himself, but clear to him now as the goal of his clumsy, forceful youth, of his anxious, successful ministry, a goal almost near enough now to touch, perhaps. He could not take his eyes from the Bishop’s face, transparent as porcelain, now turned into a mask, impenetrable.

“I would not be your choice, Bishop?”

The straight line of the Bishop’s lips formed a quiet, “No!”

“And likely enough, I may be nobody else’s choice either—in spite of—services rendered!” Then querulous before that intent, gray face that gave no sign, “It’s small odds what happens, with this head of mine! Yet I have served and would gladly serve—”

“God?” the Bishop lifted level eyes.

Newbold’s thick lips formed for a quick reply, worked oddly, then were oddly dumb a moment before they twisted into a cynic curve from the large teeth. “Harry spoke to me with some frankness this morning. He had just left me when you came, Bishop, a different visitor, it seemed to me. A curious Christmas, verily, if you, too, like all the rest, think strange things of me!”

“Strange things! Are they not true?”

A rush of anger had swept the color to the Bishop’s cheeks and shot lightnings to his eyes. The years had fallen from his face like a veil snatched aside. Yet with a torrent of words upon his tongue, the Bishop, looking at Newbold, turned silent. There are some men to whom the sight of one who cringes before a blow deserved is humiliating to their own inmost manhood. The sight of Newbold seated there, from his bowed, brute head, with its too-blue, watching eyes, to his big foot that never ceased to tap the rug raspingly, had caused the Bishop a recoil for which he hated himself. Yet his anger was just, just! The Christ Himself had cried out against the hypocrite, against commercialism in spiritual places. The Bishop, of fine frail fiber as he was himself, remembered the charm for him of the youthful Newbold’s provincial crudity and heartiness,—but now, the Bishop thought bitterly, if one wished to make a minister of the gospel, one had better take a gentleman to start with!

He had trusted Newbold at the first, as he might have trusted a son; he had forced himself to trust him afterwards, until this very day. Yet the Bishop now acknowledged that he had known well enough whose influence was at work in the diocese against his own, why certain motions he had desired were tabled in the convention, or if passed, only half-heartedly carried out. How hard the Bishop had fought not to be aware of a growing evil undercurrent in the spirit of diocesan work! He was far too sensitive not to have felt, as he talked with some of his prominent clergy and laity, his own great simple enthusiasm fall like a baffled flood against a politely concealed embarrassment he refused to understand! But he had understood! He knew now that he had.

Oh, there were powers of evil militant against the faith, the work, to which he had given his life! He had tried not to see them, to believe each man good, especially this man. Yet in this moment it seemed to him that this Newbold, seated there, was the very cause of it all, of this dark Judas spirit that everywhere throughout the diocese mocked the loveliness of Christ within His very church! Again denunciation trembled like a lash, then again was restrained because of a certain dignity in the soul gazing so grimly from the bright-blue eyes, testing the Bishop. It was a face the Bishop had loved and it was haggard as a face in a fever picture.

With all the power of vision innate in him the Bishop saw the facts of his failure. This was the man with whom, more than with any other, he had sought to share his service and his soul. They wore both of them the badge of God’s ministry, they were both of them the stewards of Christ’s mysteries; they sat now, after twenty years of friendship, two men girt in by four brief walls, yet far apart as two who do not speak each other’s tongue.

The Bishop’s brow grew tense at the hard thought that it must have been all his own fault! He had walked, as he had thought, beside the Christ, the Friend, yet a man close to him as Newbold had perceived in the Bishop himself no reflection of that Beauty! Oh, it could not be! Newbold must understand! For the very loneliness of it, the Bishop’s face grew all wistfulness, as if a child, lost on a city street, should lift its face to a stranger, hungry for kinship. But for all his seeking the Bishop could not find the lad Newbold in the face before him, grown steel-tense with scrutiny.

There was worse than this, too, as the Bishop looked, clear-eyed, on his failure. He must one day leave to this man his Westbury, if not, as chance and choice might direct, his diocese. It had been the Bishop’s comfort to believe, sensitive as he had been to the great currents of unrest and indifference in the world at large, that Westbury had remained exquisitely old-fashioned. Yet it was by the will of the congregation of St. John’s that the Southside Mission had been closed, the mission the Bishop had seen their fathers found, with free outpouring of themselves and their purses. Had the Westbury of to-day grown Judas-jealous of squandering both self and money? The Bishop must one day go forth from Westbury leaving it—nothing! And whose could be the fault but his own?

And his failure with Newbold, his failure with Westbury, they were but typical of the failure of his work at large. Of all the gifts of mystery that God gives to man, surely the greatest is the mystery of failure! Wisdom inscrutable that commands work, yet enjoins failure! Mystery of mysteries, that a burning love for that Love Incarnate born at Bethlehem, could not break through the flesh to solace a world a-thirst! The Bishop had loved, yet he had failed to serve. He did not even know how to give peace, as from a chalice, to this harried soul before him.

The worn gray face, intent, gave small clue to the thoughts within. Always Newbold watched, watched, waiting for a word. Which way would it swing, that word? His soul also was poised, waiting.

The Bishop bowed his head upon his hand. He had never felt so utterly alone. Involuntarily, from sheer force of habit belonging to all his moments of unbearable solitude, the Bishop’s thought turned to the Friend. He had always understood, would He understand now, despair at failure to God’s trust?

Suddenly the Bishop’s eyes opened wide and strange. He saw a storm-scourged hill, a mob. Understand failure? What man had ever loved like the Nazarene? What man had ever failed in such transcendent loneliness?

The room fell quiet as a sanctuary. Awed with understanding, the Bishop closed his eyes, to be alone. His thought said, “All other things He has shared with me. He shares also this.”

Quiet, long quiet, that at last grew a-throb with pulses. So many the mountains of Transfiguration, and at the bottom always the tumult and the faithlessness. The mental habit of many years steadied the Bishop as he drew slowly back to the actual: when some sorrow of his own grew too poignant to be borne, he always forced himself to go forth to the person nearest at hand, compelling his mind to the other’s affairs. Such effort, although at first it might be so perfunctory that he was ashamed, ended in full sincerity. Too tired to speak now, he smiled over to Newbold his old sunny smile, meaning that all was well between them.

The tension of Newbold’s watching snapped like a spent cord. There was a change upon his face, a change in his voice, “Bishop, why did you come to me this morning? They must have told you downstairs that I did not wish to see anyone. Yet you came.”

“I had a gift to bring.”

“For me?”

“Not now, I am afraid. Still I have no one else, lad, to leave it with. It is for Westbury.”

“What gift?”

“One I have been thinking of for a long time. You see Christmas always sets me dreaming, and in these last weeks I’ve been much shut in, so that I’ve had a good deal of time to look out of my window and to send my thoughts up and down the streets. I suppose it is because I have been about so little of late that I failed to hear of the closing of the mission, although I knew you were worried about the funds. So I’ve been happy with my plan. You’ve listened to my dreams before,” the Bishop smiled his little quick, appealing smile, “even though you haven’t always—” he broke off, a wistful twinkle of remembrance in his eyes. “I’m still an incorrigible visionary, you think, lad?” The twinkle died. “Perhaps I am!”

“No!” cried Newbold, “No! I—I would have helped to carry out all your dreams, Bishop, if I could, if they’d been practical. Why, Bishop,” Newbold smiled the first real smile of the morning, “you’re irresistible as my Lois when you want things. Even Mrs. Hollister has to do what you want!”

“Even Mrs. Hollister!” repeated the Bishop wonderingly. “But, of course, for she is my friend.”

“You understand Mrs. Hollister better than I do, Bishop,” Newbold murmured darkly, then could have bitten his lip, for he saw on the Bishop’s face the fine, controlled recoil that told Newbold he had once again said something no real Westburian would have said. Clumsy again, when he was watching himself all the time! Oh, if there was one thing Newbold envied the Bishop, it was his inalienable social grace!

The Bishop’s smile was strangely wrought of sun and sadness. “To go back to my dream,” he suggested, “so far from being prepared for the closing of the mission, I had actually been planning its enlargement.” He grew a little hesitant and shy, “You see I have a small private fortune, not very much, some sixty thousand. I have, as you know, no near relatives. I’m not much of a business man, as you are well aware, and I have also perhaps a foolish reluctance to leaving anything in the shape of a memorial, anything bearing my name,—yet it was here in Westbury, in St. John’s, and at the founding of the mission in the Southside sixty years ago, that there first came to me—the meaning of the Christian ministry.” A moment his eyes grew dream-bright, as he continued, “I’m so in the habit of trusting all money matters to you that I have simply had my will made out to you, without any stipulation as to the object—”

“To me?”

“In trust,” said the Bishop, “for Westbury.”

“To me!”

“I must trust you, lad!”

Newbold’s eyes, round with amazement, dropped before the pure flame of the Bishop’s.

“I had thought,” the clear voice went on, “that you would be glad to have the management of this money for Westbury, because it was here in Westbury, and in St. John’s, and in work for the Southside, that you, too, twenty years ago, came to your first thoughts of the Christian ministry.”

“Yes,” muttered Newbold, “twenty years ago!” His foot ceased to tap the floor. He sat straight, motionless, “What, Bishop, was your idea, exactly, for the use of this sixty thousand?”

“My idea—I—I suppose it’s impractical now—was what I called it in my mind, the House of Friendship. Not, of course, that I want it called that in reality. That’s, of course,” he said in quick deprecation, “sentimental in sound, but that’s what I mean.”

“Exactly what?” probed Newbold.

“You know,” the other appealed whimsically, “I left all the details to you even in my plans. I thought I’d just explain the spirit of it. A House of Friendship, that is a settlement house, in connection with the chapel in the Southside, a house open to everybody, to the mothers and fathers and the babies and the little girls and the newsboys, and open—still more open—to the members of St. John’s over here, on River Street, so that the mission and the church might learn, from each other, to be friends. I haven’t gone into the details, although I want to, one of these days, when my head gets a little clearer. The main thing was that you should understand.”

“And I am to understand that your will is made out to me, with no instructions as to the use of the money?”

“Yes.”

“Does anyone know of your desire for the settlement house?”

“No one. You were the only one who needed to know.”

Newbold looked straight at his visitor. “Has it occurred to you, Bishop, that you are taking a great risk?”

“What do you mean, lad?” asked the Bishop wonderingly.

Newbold laughed, a laugh that rang true with honest amusement. “Well, hardly, as we both know, that I should make way with the money for my own ends, or that one cent of it shall be spent except for the object of your desire, but,—” his face grew grave and dark, “you imply, I think, something more. It is not merely the money that you leave in my charge, Bishop, but the work itself?”

“I had always hoped, lad, to leave my work in your charge. In spirit, if not in actuality.”

“Do you hope so this morning?”

“May I hope so, Murray?” Once before, on the night of his ordination, the Bishop had called Newbold by his first name.

Newbold’s answer was as direct to the soul as the Bishop’s question, “I don’t know!” Then sharp and querulous, “How could I? How can I?”

The kindled hope on the Bishop’s face died like a quenched flame. In its stead slowly there grew in his eyes their great and brooding pity. “Lad, you’re tired to the depths this morning, and I am fretting you with the thought of new responsibilities. Forgive me. I hope that in eighty-one years I’ve learned to listen. Suppose you do the talking now. What are some of the bothers back of this headache?”

“My head is the chief bother, back of all bothers! It won’t let me go on and I can’t stop!” Newbold sprang up and then reseated himself at his desk, sweeping a fret of papers aside so that some fell on the floor, then taking up a flexible paper cutter that he kept snapping in his hands while he swung the revolving chair slowly from side to side. “The truth is, I’ve been going down hill ever since I came here eight years ago. The air of Westbury is knocking me to pieces.”

“Yet it agreed with you during your other stay here, twenty odd years ago.”

“I was a boy then; I had a different body.”

“And perhaps,” mused the Bishop, “a different soul.”

“Oh, that!” cried Newbold with a shrug, then, “Do you suppose if I’d had my health, I’d ever have let the vestry bully me into giving up the Southside Mission!”

“Yet I used to think sometimes that opposition was the breath of life to you. I wonder,” a flicker of whimsical humor in the blue eyes, “if perhaps it would still be the breath of life to you,—if you tried it!”

“Can I fight a spirit in the air? Can I fight, of all things, mere amusement at enthusiasm? Can I fight the impenetrable self-satisfaction of Westbury?”

“Yet I thought you were one who loved Westbury!”

“I love it, yes! And I hate it!”

“Yet Westbury has loved you and taken you in, as it once took me, also a stranger.”

“It has never taken me in! Has Mrs. Hollister ever taken me in?”

“Newbold, may I ask,” the Bishop sought to be patient with a resentful child, “whether Mrs. Hollister has ever shown you the slightest incivility?”

“Never!” Newbold pressed his lips together in a curious grim smile. He studied the paper-knife in his hands intently, “Oh, no, I should not find fault with Westbury. It has given me what I wanted when I came here as a boy, to be rector of St. John’s. I did not perceive then the price a man pays to be rector of—a St. John’s.”

“What price?”

“The price of his freedom! There’s no way to please the congregation of St. John’s, except to please them! I’ve learned the trick of that! Ah, commend me to the clergy as latter-day courtiers!” It was sentences such as these, applied in the chancel to his congregation, not to himself, that his people so enjoyed in his sermons, feeling him at one with them in a comfortable, workaday cynicism. Newbold’s words were pressed through closed teeth as he concluded, “But I despise my people!”

“Your people of the Southside, too?”

“They! Oh, no! Poor wretches! They are honest! I understand them! But it is the strain of trying to understand St. John’s that is killing me!” his hand went impatiently to his head.

Serene and low the Bishop’s words, “Then why not go to your people of the Southside?”