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?”
“And leave St. John’s?”
“If you do not understand the people of St. John’s. If it is killing you.”
“They would think me a madman!”
“Does it matter, what they think?”
“It has mattered,” Newbold replied grimly, “a good bit, for eight years!”
“And where has that road brought us, lad?”
Silence.
Low, incisive against the stillness, the Bishop’s voice, “Verily you have had your reward.”
Newbold’s hands dropped to the desk motionless.
“Yet even so, amid the praise of men, there was one man whose praise you never had.”
Newbold lifted his eyes in interrogation.
“Yourself!” the Bishop concluded.
Suddenly Newbold’s face, set as marble, puckered unbearably. “There’s someone else, too!” Forcing the words out, he quoted, “‘I don’t care if you are a minister. I’m your son, and I know you’re a hypocrite!’ How’s that,” he was furious at the catch in his throat, “how’s that—for a speech—from an only son—on Christmas morning!”
“It is not true, Murray!”
“You are perhaps the only man who believes in me, Bishop.”
“It is because I have known you longest.”
“I am afraid the truth is that your namesake, my son, has the sharper eyes, as well as the sharper tongue. A son’s estimate of his father is doubtless the correct one. Yet it’s an ugly word—hypocrite! I confess it drew blood, and knocked me out for the day.” He looked oddly sheepish, boyish, in his confession, in spite of all the signs of torturing nerves upon a body too vigorous to take ill-health with any poise or patience. “You see I got up this morning feeling rather out of sorts. I hadn’t slept since twelve. I’ve been dreading the services more and more lately. I’m haunted by the idea of collapsing suddenly before the eyes of my congregation—those eyes!
“Then breakfast was late. If only, only, only,” his heavy fist came down lightly but tensely upon the blotter, “the women would not look as if they expected a scene under such circumstances. I had meant to hold my tongue. But I didn’t. Nobody said anything, so I fancy I continued to fill in the pauses. Harry sat with a face that made me want to knock him down. It was afterwards that he spoke, a full hour afterwards, when I had managed to pull myself together and was on my way to church. He stopped me in the hall with ‘Going to the communion, father? After making mother and Lois feel like that?’ Then he added that little remark about hypocrisy, I came back upstairs, here. Presently you came. A highly successful Christmas! A merry family group, do you not think so, Bishop?”
The Bishop had closed his eyes. This was the kind of thing that hurt his head, and he must keep his head clear, must! “Christmas is not half over,” he said, starting at the thought of the morning slipping by, and the church, so near, calling to him, “There is half of Christmas left!”
“Half a day in which to teach my son to respect me!”
“But this son is Harry. So it will not take so long.”
“Harry is hard!”
“He is generous!”
“He never forgives!”
“Have you ever asked him to forgive?”
“My boy! No! I know him! He knows me!”
“I think perhaps,” the Bishop said slowly, “you will never know Harry, nor he you, until you have asked of him forgiveness. It’s one of the test things, forgiveness. The boy will meet it. He has nobility, Harry, by inheritance.”
“From his mother, yes.”
“From his father, no less.”
“They are their mother’s children, both of them,” Newbold murmured wearily.
The Bishop’s face flashed radiant. His right hand lifted in a quick gesture. “Can any man say anything more beautiful than that?”
“You mean,” stammered Newbold, “what?”
“I think I only meant,” hesitated the Bishop, “that I felt just that way about my child, and her mother. They belonged to each other, not to me. I was only fit to try to take care of them.”
“I have not taken,” said Newbold heavily, “much care of mine!”
“Oh, lad, lad,” said the Bishop, “don’t waste that privilege. It never—it never has grown easy—for me to live without it.”
Newbold’s words came in a whisper, to himself, “She does not expect it now. Perhaps she does not even wish it!”
The Bishop leaned slightly forward in his chair. “Newbold,” he said firmly, “between you and Harry there must be words, as between men. But, for Lois and the mother, downstairs, have you anything to do but to stretch out your hand? It is one of their mysteries, that women always understand better without words.”
Newbold dropped his forehead on interlaced fingers that concealed his face. He was long silent. His hands dropped at last from a face haggard, but a-shine with boyishness.
“Bishop,” he said, “you’ve made me feel a whole lot better!”
“I am glad!” For the first time in their talk the Bishop’s lip showed its slight palsied trembling.
“You always did make me feel better. It is your secret.” Then a shadow fell, “But how? Why?” the shadow darkened. “I don’t deserve it!”
The Bishop studied the darkened face with a sad keenness. “You have not told me all the worries this morning, have you? What else?”
Newbold stirred uneasily, then brightened a little with reminiscence, “Odd, how little things take one back sometimes. The mere way we are sitting at this moment,—you, Bishop, in that deep chair with your hands on the arms, and I here at the desk,—it makes me feel as if you might take up the dictating and I my shorthand at any instant.”
“It does not seem to me so very long ago.”
“It strikes me now, that you were pretty patient. I was a raw enough youth when I first came to Westbury.”
“A bit truculent in argument sometimes,” admitted the other, smiling. “You bowled over some of our best doctors in theology. There wasn’t much you were afraid of.”
“On the contrary, I was afraid of everything. It was the first time I had ever been afraid, too. Westbury frightened me.”
“Yet I knew then that you would live to make Westbury proud of you. I believe I never had such hopes for any young man as I had for you.”
“And now?”
“And now?” The Bishop turned the question back upon the man.
“And now,” said Newbold bitterly, “where are the hopes?”
“Exactly where they were before. Don’t you know, lad, that we old men are incorrigible in hopes?”
“I know that you are, Bishop, incorrigible in hope,—and in patience.”
The Bishop’s eyes narrowed to fine scrutiny, “Have I then, do you feel, something to be patient about?”
Newbold shot a sharp glance, searching the Bishop’s meaning. They both waited. At last Newbold, leaning back in his chair lifted steady eyes. “Since we’re talking this morning, Bishop, about the things on my mind, there are, as you seem to guess, more things. I’d be glad to get them all clear with you this morning. It’s a relief to talk, no matter where we come out. I’m afraid, that perhaps you haven’t always understood, Bishop, my apparent opposition to your wishes on some occasions that perhaps we both remember.”
“We both remember, yes!”
At the tone Newbold started, grew more vehement, “Oh, if you could but understand, Bishop! Why, sometimes, as I have stood between your desires on the one hand and what I knew to be those of the majority of the clergy and laity on the other, what I knew to be necessary to the prosperity of the diocese and the church, I have verily felt myself between two fires.”
“Or between two masters?”
Nervous irritation fretted Newbold’s forehead. “Yes, I suppose, that, too, in a way, from your point of view, Bishop. The point of view of—well—of the apostles, perhaps!” He hesitated, but then grew defensive, “In practical application, Bishop, it is impossible that the policies of primitive Christianity should prevail in their pristine simplicity in the church to-day!”
The Bishop was long silent, the white profile of his far-away face clear before Newbold’s watching eyes. Newbold spoke at last in anxious apology. “You understand, therefore, I hope, Bishop, my policy, as I understand yours? I wanted you to understand.”
“Why do you want me to understand?”
There was something very strange in those far, far blue eyes, so old, so ageless. Newbold gazed into them, curiously compelled. “Perhaps you know best the answer to that, Bishop.”
A wistful smile touched the Bishop’s lips, “Perhaps I do, lad. For it has been a long while that we have been friends.”
“You know, Bishop, surely,” the man cried out, “how I feel toward you,—in spite of—mere policies?”
The Bishop nodded slightly, “Yes, yes,” then looked at the other with a larger thought. “But, Newbold, I have no policy, I have found only one reading to the riddle of life, and I preach it. There is no policy in that, I think, is there?”
“I think,” said Newbold, quietly, “that you are the only man I have ever seen solve that riddle.”
“I have not solved it, Murray, if I have not given you the clew.”
At that unbearable sadness Murray Newbold cried out, “No, Bishop, no! If I have failed, it is not your failure! Faith such as yours, life such as yours,—it is impossible to men like me. It is not for us.”
“I always thought it was for all.” There was a long pause. “And it is. I have not known how to show you, that is all.” The Bishop bowed his head in silence, murmuring, “But I wanted you,” again a long pause, “as you would want peace for your boy!”
The next words were not to Newbold, but Newbold knew to Whom they were spoken, “Yet I ask so much! We can never share with Him, we who ask fulfillment!” Then the Bishop started sharply from revery, “The service! I must go. It is too late, perhaps, already for the communion.”
“There is just time. But, Bishop, will you go? There is so much still to say. Stay a little while!”
“What I have failed to say in twenty years, can I say now? In a little while?”
“Say it!” pleaded Newbold, “say it!”
Like a physical need, like hunger, the Bishop felt the blind desire to feel the chancel quiet about him, to offer once more to his people the cup of Christ. Yet before him here and now, in this silent room, a soul a-thirst.
“What is it, lad, that you want from me?”
“You believe it, Bishop?” Newbold burst forth.
“What?”
“What we preach. I never knew any man to believe it as you do. How?”
“How otherwise?”
“I never knew any other man who had found peace. How?”
“It is hard,” hesitated the Bishop, “for me to talk about these things—with you. It is hard for me to understand,” his tired eyes widened with the effort to understand. “You mean with the Story ever before you, that yet you cannot see—Him?”
“I see nothing. I’ve come to a pretty dark place in my career, successful, I suppose it would be called.”
“Since I’ve come to be old, I find I don’t always call things by their right names. Success and failure, I don’t always know how to name them.”
“But you have success!”
“No—no, you have showed me clearly to-day that I have failure.”
“I have shown you?”
“Don’t you remember that I came here with a hope?”
“Which I have destroyed? But, Bishop, the work you describe is impossible to me. You know, no one better, what I am. The amazing thing is that knowing, you still chose me. Why, such a work requires a courage, a conviction, a vision such as—”
“You have not courage?”
“Not, not courage of your sort, now.”
“I believe it is courage of your sort, not my sort, that Westbury needs, now.”
“It would mean a complete facing about. That would surprise,” he smiled grimly, “a few people! I don’t know that I should really mind surprising them.” Then his face again clouded. “The Southside would find me out, Bishop. I have not the vision. I don’t know that I thought it necessary, originally. It’s been, however, of late years, a bit persistent, the advantage, say, of believing what one says one believes.” The caustic tone changed to intensity, “If I were capable, Bishop, of your faith!”
The Bishop studied him wistfully, “And yet,” he mused, “it seems to me so simple, faith, so unavoidable, like sunshine. No man could have made the sun. Just so, it seems as if no man could have invented—that Beauty!”
“Unfortunately most people don’t see things quite so readily. As for me, I believe I’m incapable of religious vision.”
The Bishop hesitated, thoughtful, then quick words came, “But not incapable of action. I’ve always believed that there is need perhaps for soldiers as well as seers. There’s the fighter somewhere within you, isn’t there?”
“I sometimes feel,” Newbold admitted, “as if there were as much fight left in me as there is in Harry to-day. One sees,” he mused, “some pretty queer things when one looks inside.” Then once more he caught up the paper cutter in restless fingers, “But that won’t last. I seem to see a thing or two while you’re here, seem to be more up to—several things. It will all come back fast enough when I’m alone. You’ll carry this quiet away with you, Bishop.”
“I wish I could leave it with you! Couldn’t I, somehow?”
“You couldn’t, could you, put me back twenty years, and give me another try at it all? No, no, I don’t see the way to that!”
“Do it! Don’t wait to see it! Vision!” the Bishop paused. “It is perhaps true that it is not given to all to see, to feel, to know. Yet those who do not see can act! Perhaps—perhaps—it is more beautiful and more brave to work without the vision! We are the stewards, we call ourselves that, you and I—God puts a cup into our hands. He doesn’t say, ‘Believe,’ or ‘See.’ He only says, ‘Give’!”
“But it is as you give, Bishop!”
Their eyes met long. Then the tense pause slackened. Murray Newbold knew best his feeling for the Bishop when he felt the child gazing from the faded eyes and speaking in his pleading voice.
“Murray, will you build, then, the House of Friendship, for Westbury?”
Silence. Newbold had bowed his forehead upon his interlaced fingers. His face was concealed except the strong jaw, and the lips, motionless, curiously refined by their tight pressure. Moments went by. Within closed eyelids Newbold saw his future. He saw the past as if the issues between himself and the Bishop had been always mounting to this final issue. He saw himself, objective, detached as a painting. So taut were all his senses on this morning that it seemed to him that he should always see the Bishop’s face looking upon him just as he had closed his eyes against it, there across the desk. It was a moment of such intense seeing as makes promises impossible. The minutes went, one after one. He could not have spoken a word.
A touch brushed Newbold’s shoulder, “I am going now, lad,” the Bishop said. Sudden and clamorous, the noon-day chimes, at the close of the service, rang out, as the study door closed.