The air of the blue Christmas noon was sparkling clear, yet the Bishop’s steps were groping. His blue eyes were vague as he smiled in response to motor cars that flashed by, or carriages that passed with a brisk jingle of harness. Groups, lightly laughing in the Christmas sun, brushed by the old familiar figure in the cape overcoat, but they seemed strangers. In the sharp daylight after that dusky study, the Bishop trod an unknown street, as wistful and alone as a lost child. Was this his Westbury, where none of this gay Christmas throng gave thought to those swarming tenements at the bending of the river? An old man’s life, what was it, against this hard and happy current? A smile, briefly bitter, darkened the Bishop’s face; he was old and would pass, having given his Westbury nothing!
Yet all the time his feet, making for reassurance and relief, were bearing him toward Lucy Hollister’s welcome, with the homing instinct of a child that knows one door its own. Across the Bishop’s weariness flashed the thought that in the afternoon Lucy would let him lie down for a while.
Lucy’s door opened wide to the Bishop. He felt once again, as the closed latch shut him in from that vague and puzzling street, the spell of the wide hall that cleft the house, and of grave old walls showing at the opposite end a picture of the river through broad glass. The Bishop handed his coat and hat to the brown old footman, his friend of many years, then his head cleared happily at the sound of a soft rustle and the tapping of light decisive slippers. Lucy’s hand was in his.
“Good Christmas, Henry,” she said crisply, and led him in to the drawing-room fire.
“I was worried,” she went on. “You were not at church, nor at the house when I drove there afterward.”
“The service?” he inquired anxiously.
“It was not Christmas without your sermon. Otherwise it was—well, a service. For we missed our rector, too!”
“He is ill.”
“Is he?” inquired Lucy with musing emphasis. “And of what sickness? Too much Westbury?”
But at the Bishop’s troubled glance her tone changed instantly, “But you yourself, Henry, have you been, are you, ill?”
“Not now, not here. It is really Christmas here.”
“I am glad,” she answered; then, with an unperceived catch of her breath, “if it is really Christmas—here!”
“How many Christmas dinners is it, Lucy?”
“I do not count them,” to herself she added, looking at him, “those that are over!”
They fell to talking of the Christmases that were over. The Bishop did not know that from time to time he leaned his head back, closing his lids, and was silent while minutes ticked slowly and Lucy watched him intently. It was comforting when he opened his eyes still to see her sitting there, so alert, so alive.
“So many Christmases!” he murmured.
“I neither own to them,” she answered, “nor yet, not own!”
Despite her many Christmases, it was with only a slight stiffening of the sinuous grace of her girlhood that Lucy moved at the Bishop’s side, to the dining-room, to the mid-afternoon holiday dinner of Westbury habit. Lucy kept every custom Westbury had had in her youth, and she made other people keep such custom, too; slight, elusive, dominant, as she was, in her great house by Westbury’s river. They passed from stately course to course exactly as they had done on that Christmas when Henry Collinton and his wife had dined with Lucy when Annie was a bride, and still earlier, the Bishop could remember dining at that table, when he was a college lad and the two cousins, girls, Annie the dark one, and Lucy, elfin and amber-tinted. The room was the same, the china and the silver the same. Beyond the two long windows ran the gray loop of the river. Many a time long ago, they had floated all three in a boat on that spangled river. The wall paper was the same, put on by French hands many a year ago. Round and round it raced a French sporting scene, trim-waisted gentlemen that rode to the hunt by wood and stream, and ladies that joined them for the huntsman’s repast, gay picnickers all, still vivid in color.
It was all the same, for in Westbury things did continue blessedly unchanged. Lucy was unchanged, for all the long wearing of her widow’s black. The yellow still showed in the snowy gloss of her carefully arranged hair. Age had slightly rimmed her eyes with red, but the will-o’-the-wisp still danced in them. Her mouth, netted by wrinkles, was hardly more finely whimsical than in girlhood. As of old, when in earnest talk, she dropped her chin, still clearly chiseled, to a delicate white claw of a hand, flashing from a fall of black chiffon. Lucy treated age as she did people: like them, age could not tell whether it had penetrated her delicate aloofness.
To the Bishop, room and river and woman were still the same. Spent to the uttermost as he knew himself to be to-day, Lucy’s indomitable vitality quickened him with sharp hope; perhaps, after all, there was much he could still leave to Lucy! But not yet for him the outpouring, as ever, into Lucy’s ear. That would come, but not yet! How happy, now, shut in by that race round and round the walls of those merry picnickers, to pluck, as it were a Christmas gift from a tree, one hour in which they should still be boy and girl together.
As they talked, two faces looked over their shoulders; over the Bishop’s a boy’s with brown hair flung back, with eager listening eyes, and a mouth that spoke poetry and as instantly laughed out in merry mockery of it, a face that, clear as water, was all the play of a mobile brain; and close by Lucy’s head, another in a white bonnet, green-ribboned and green-leaved, from which, framed in red-gold curls, looked out a tinted cameo face, with green-blue eyes, mocking and mysterious. To-day, Lucy’s body was still fragile and unbroken, as in girlhood, and for all she had married and borne four children, her soul still went unfettered as when she was a girl. But age had charred the Bishop’s face to fine white ashes, in which the blue eyes burned, luminous and inward.
“Henry,” mused Lucy, “the poetry never came back to you, did it? Do you ever write nowadays, ever snare a little wild, singing poem now?”
“The verses come to me sometimes still, but not near enough to catch, or to wish to catch, perhaps. I do sometimes see the pictures still, this very morning, for instance, and I hear rhythms; but, no, I have never written since—since Nan went.”
He was silent a moment, lips tightening, then lights began to gleam on his face, with the familiar pleasure of thinking aloud to Lucy. “But perhaps I do not write because I can no longer distinguish between poetry and prose, in life. That is boy’s work, really, to see the sharp outlines of things that afterwards, for us, seem to overlap, to interweave. Poetry and prose, which is which? Just so the distinction between the sacred and the secular, easy enough at twenty, not at eighty: then the two were clear to me as bars of sun and shadow on a pavement; now the sun-bars would seem all softened with shadow, and the shadow all shot through with sun. Just so the distinction between the divine and the human, God and man, where shall one separate the two? Can anyone say. Just so far,—” here the Bishop, all eager explanation, drew the figure of a cross upon the leather armchair, keeping an ivory finger tip upon the spot, “just so far shall God stoop to man, just so far man rise to God! Oh! no, no!” He erased the imaginary cross with a quick brushing of his long hand, “life is not like that, not sharp distinctions, it is all interwoven, interwoven!
“So with poetry and prose. How can I possibly write,” he laughed, “if I can’t tell them apart? Why, nowadays I seem to get meshed in my own metres. No, I’m no true poet,” he shook his head ruefully, “if I can’t tell whether a poem is inside of me or outside of me, whether I am it, or it is I! No, old age is the time for seeing, not for singing.” He paused, thinking, “But I verily believe I like the seeing better than the singing.” He looked over to her in the old, quick boyish way, “Don’t you?”
Lucy gave her little humorous shrug, inimitably slight, “O Henry, forgive me, I believe old age for me is all plain prose.”
He laughed his silvery old laugh, in pure amusement, “And that from you, who know nothing whatever about old age!”
“I! I know everything about old age!”
“Prove it!” he rallied, “prove it! Prove that you know one thing more about old age to-day than you did when you were twenty!”
Her face, still beautiful despite its subtlety of lines, grew strange, and her humorous lips delicately mocking, “No, I don’t believe I could—prove—that I know anything more about old age to-day—than I did when I was twenty!”
“There,” he cried gaily, “you admit it?”
“Admit what, my friend?”
“That you are still a girl!”
“Yet, a grandmother?”
“One can never somehow remember that,” his gaze upon her changed to puzzled thought.
“Yet I am a grandmother, a model mother and grandmother, I’d have you remember!”
“It is very strange,” he mused, “mine, who are gone, seem almost nearer than yours, who are here. I sometimes have wondered why you never choose to go to them at Christmas-time. Although it is a happy thing for me that you do not.”
“I prefer my Christmas to myself!”
“But isn’t it lonely?”
“Lonely, when you have never failed me, Henry!” she laughed. “You know I’m a stickler for old customs. I can’t change old friends for new grandchildren.”
“Grandchildren!” he shook his head. “No, it is impossible to believe in them! You seem to me still Lucy Dwight of the long ago,” a twinkle danced in his eyes, “and aren’t you?”
“Who can answer that question but Henry Collinton, of the long ago? Who else remembers?”
They both remembered, and fell silent, joining thoughts.
At length the Bishop, shining-eyed, exclaimed, “Those were great days, when I came here to college!”
“Great days, yes, when I—when we—taught you the town. You thought everything so wonderful that you almost made me believe Westbury wonderful, too.”
“And didn’t you, don’t you, believe it wonderful?”
She looked at him quietly, “But Westbury is my own,” she answered.
“And isn’t it,” he pleaded, “my own, too, by this time?”
“Yours?” she looked at him with far, intent eyes, then before his wide child-gaze, troubled, her smile flashed reassurance, “Yours, surely, Henry!” again she fell thoughtful, “yet it depends a little on what you mean!”
“Westbury has been mine,” he maintained, and then, not confident, “and Westbury has not changed, has it, Lucy?”
She was silent.
“It has not changed, Lucy?”
“Oh, no, no, Henry,” she comforted him, “How? Where? Look about and see!”
“Once it sent more men forth into the church than any other place in all the country. Will it, do you believe, continue to do that?”
“Westbury is still churchly! Look at us! Westbury still goes to church. I myself set the example.”
“Westbury always has followed your example,” the Bishop answered; again he felt a start of hope, but still postponed in this pleasant lighter hour the full revelation of his morning’s anxiety.
“Westbury will always follow my example, Henry, just so long as I give it its head. It is a triumph, is it not,” her lips puckered whimsically, “for an old lady to lead a town by a string? If I cared for the triumph! Not to let Westbury get away from me, that has been at least an absorbing pastime. I have spent my life trying to keep Westbury the Westbury of my youth!” Quizzical, darting gleams showed in her eyes.
“There was no more beautiful way to spend your life,” the Bishop answered.
Lucy’s face changed, old age dropped over it like a veil, from which her eyes looked forth, strange.
“I, too,” the Bishop answered, “have wished to spend my life in keeping Westbury the Westbury of my youth. It seemed so beautiful to me! People were already beginning to be in a hurry in other places, but they still had time to be kind, here. They were already locking themselves into classes in other places, but they still had time to be friends, rich with poor, rich with rich, here. You remember the mission, Lucy?”
She started, glancing at him with quick, culprit look, which he, lost in dreams, did not observe, continuing, “Westbury was a place of beautiful friendship, a place to make a young man dream dreams.”
Very low she whispered, “Your dreams, Henry, not Westbury’s!”
“It has not changed, has it, Lucy?”
She did not answer at first, then a smile, elusive, sweet, brushed her lips and was gone, “No, Henry!”
“For how could it,” he burst out joyously, “how could it, when you have not changed, and you are Westbury!”
“I am Westbury?”
“Yes!” he answered, “yes!”
“Have you always thought that, Henry?”
“I believe so, yes.”
But beneath his clear, smiling gaze, the witch lights gleamed in her eyes, “I wonder if you will always think so, Henry!” But his words seemed to have made her inattentive, restless, so that it was at length almost abruptly that she rose. She turned an instant toward the picture framed by the window.
“How you love this town, Henry!”
“It is my piece of God’s world,” he answered with that simple reverence that could startle, then he stopped before turning away from the table, “May I?” he asked permission, as he picked up a sprig of holly. “We’ve had none at the house, and you remember how Annie loved holly.”
“Yes,” Lucy answered, “I remember—Annie’s holly.”
The Bishop still kept the spray of crimson berries in his hand when they had crossed the hall into the library, where the fire sprang high and where beyond the twin windows that matched those of the dining-room, the river had turned to slaty gray below the dulling eastern sky. The light in the room was quite clear, but yet the Bishop, in the dizziness that followed his rising and walking from the dining-room, groped for a chair, and sank into it awkwardly, leaning back a moment with shut eyes. For the instant his clear old face looked withered, and his hands upon the chair-arms hung lax.
Lucy was still standing against the fire glow, slight, vivid, imperious.
“Henry!”
The Bishop opened vague eyes.
“I can’t let you look like that, Henry, to-day!”
The Bishop smiled, “I’m a bit tired. I’ve just remembered it. You had made me forget it, as usual, made me forget both the tiredness and some other things. They come back upon me now. I’ve had a rather rough morning of it, to tell the truth.”
“Tell me about it,” she said, sitting down.
“I’ve been hearing things I didn’t want to hear, and believing things I didn’t want to believe, and trying to do things I couldn’t do, all morning. It seems a pretty long time since to-day began. Oh, I was going to do great things to-day when I got up!”
“But the day is not over.”
“That is just it,” he answered. “My day is over!”
“No, no, it must never be over! You must never speak like that! Why even I—” she broke off, “but you, Henry! Who were always such a boy for hoping! You mustn’t stop; I’ll never let you!”
He looked at her with a grave, far gaze, “It would be a Christmas gift that I need, Lucy, if to-day you gave me hope. You are the only person who can!”
“What has gone wrong, Henry?”
“It was only that I wanted to give Westbury a Christmas present, and Westbury would not have it.”
“Who, pray, had the right to say so?”
“Newbold.”
“Newbold! He! What rights has he in Westbury, may I ask?”
The Bishop’s glance was startled and penetrating, “Has he none, Lucy?”
She caught back her words sharply, saying merely, “No right to hurt you, Henry, that is all. But tell me about the Christmas present to Westbury. It is some new philanthropic scheme of yours, I suppose. Tell me about it, for you know you might offer your Christmas present to me. Try whether I’ll take it, if I am Westbury.”
As before, he knocked, all eager, and again opening doors flashed ruddy on the night
His face broke aflame, “You will?” he cried, “I believe that you can!”
“Tell me!” she repeated, dropping her chin upon her white bodkin fingers, and fixing her eyes upon the beauty of his face.
The two clear, pale old faces looked forth at each other across a space, while slowly there drew in about them the mystery of the dusk. Athwart the gathering twilight, the Bishop’s voice fell musical and clear.
“The day didn’t go very well, not till I got here to you. I got up feeling a bit shaky. I’m going to treat myself to that couch over there presently. Perhaps if my head had been clearer I might have seen better how to do what I tried to do to-day. But I’m afraid the real trouble goes deeper, and dates farther back. Christmas day sometimes throws a light back over the other days and years. I haven’t done what might have been done with all the years that have been granted me. I see that to-day. And now it is too late, isn’t it?”
“What has happened to-day?”
“Nothing has happened but knowledge, perhaps, knowledge to which I have forced myself to be blind. But in the light of Christmas I had to see, that’s all. And so I suppose I’m a little discouraged, and need to be bolstered up, as you can. It’s a good thing for me that you’ve never had time to grow old, Lucy. For it’s no fun,” his smile flashed, then fell as suddenly, “this being old.”
She fought against his growing seriousness, “I’ve had to stay young, Henry, to keep you from growing old. So don’t go and be old all of a sudden to-day,”—she forced her tone to evenness, “not to-day of all days! I will have to-day!”
“I wanted to-day, too,” he answered, “but I’ve had to give up what I wanted, so far, twice.”
“Who, exactly, is the trouble, Henry?”
“Newbold.”
He paused so long that Lucy asked with the faintest frown of weariness, “Well, and what has that young man done to-day?”
“Young, he is that, certainly! I half forgot it, young and therefore,—” again he stopped, but his eyes were kindled.
“No, not ‘therefore,’” Lucy answered keenly, “if you mean by that that he is still young enough to improve.”
“Not with help?”
“Whose?”
The Bishop hesitated, eyes intent, searching hers, then answered, “Westbury’s, for Westbury has hurt him.”
“Will he profit by Westbury’s help if he has not profited by yours?”
The Bishop mused, frankly anxious, puzzled, “I had been thinking that if Westbury had hurt him, just for that reason perhaps, Westbury—could also help him, and would.”
“Oh, Henry, Henry,” she shook her head with pursed, humorous lips, “you talk in abstract terms. But Westbury is no abstraction. ‘Westbury could help him.’ Exactly what do you mean? For who, pray, is Westbury?”
The Bishop’s gaze met hers; there was humor in his eyes as in hers, but also something deeper, something watchful, strange.
“Oh,” she laughed, “I remember. I am Westbury! Do you mean, Henry Collinton, that I am to help this Newbold of yours? That I am to make a gentleman of him, if you couldn’t?”
But at her words the Bishop’s face grew stern, “No, I have utterly failed to make him anything that I wished. But it is arrogant, perhaps, this hoping to make anybody anything. Yet how could I help hoping? He was a splendid boy, and I had no son.”
In that stern, brooding silence, Lucy said at length, “Don’t mind too much, Henry. Remember you idealize—persons and—towns. He was always out of place here, that is all. He could never belong here.”
The Bishop turned his head in the old quick boyish way, “But could he not have a place in Westbury, if Westbury would make a place for him?”
“Incorrigible one!” she smiled. “How?”
Stern age in judgment on his failure left the Bishop’s face,—the little sunny child stole back to it. “I have a little hope,” he admitted, “but so very small! It depends on you, all of it.”
His eyes were all aflame, but his tone was grave. “You know so well how to help a man in his work, how to cheer him on through doubt and failure. Have you ever failed me?”
“I know how to let a man talk to me, perhaps,” she murmured.
“Yes, how you have let me talk to you, always,—ever since the mission was founded! Ever since that day we have talked, ever since that day I have brought my work to you!”
“And I have listened!”
“And have helped! Lucy, as you have helped,” she felt the sharp intake of his breath, “as you have helped me, could you not also help him who shall come after me?”
“Come after you? What, whom, do you mean, Henry! You cannot surely mean that he, your Newbold, shall come after you?”
“You know the diocese, Lucy, as I know it—can you doubt that—Dr. Newbold—will come after me?”
“Henry, would you, could you, choose that he should? After you?”
“What choice have I? I—I am passing on. The sadness is that I would have desired him to follow me, once.”
“Now?”
“Will you help him, Lucy?”
“How?”
“Be his friend. He does not believe you his friend. It is the only hope.”
“Hope of what, Henry?”
“It seems to me at this moment, the only hope of all that I have desired.”
Leaning back in infinite weariness, he gazed into the fire, silently. In the dusky room the fire glow was rosy warm about them, as they sat in twin chairs before the hearth. Silently the old footman had entered, and across the room had lighted and turned low a green-shaded lamp. Lucy sat motionless. A coal slipped down, with a whisper, glowed, and dimmed to ashes.
“What have you desired, Henry?”
The Bishop turned, “You have had all my dreams,” he answered, “so you know.” A strange mysticism showed upon his face, “I have desired to-day, to give all that I had to the poor, and to the rich, to the rich! And I could not!” At her look of puzzled curiosity, he explained quickly, with a passing smile, “But that is a Christmas secret, between Dr. Newbold and me. And besides, it is all over, now,—that little Christmas dream.” Again a long gaze into the fire where one can watch one’s wishes glowing, dying. “And I have desired most of all, to leave my work to someone who would understand and carry it on!”
“Who could understand, Henry,” she whispered, “your work?”
He turned his head toward her, quick and sunny. “You alone, perhaps, and therefore you will help him to understand.”
“How?”
“By giving him courage, as you have given it to me.”
“I never gave you courage.”
“Yes! And so, let me believe, you will give it to him!”
“Courage for what? Be explicit, dreamer!”
“Courage to reopen the Southside Mission, and to keep it open,—and every mission throughout the diocese! Let him know that Westbury stands by him there!”
“But if—” she spoke low, “if it doesn’t?”
There was a stab of pain on the Bishop’s face, and then bright hope, “Let him know you do! That will be enough! And besides,” he smiled, “can you not make Westbury do whatever you wish?”
“I never tried,” she answered musingly, “to make Westbury do anything it did not wish.”
“I cannot believe,” he cried, “that it wishes the closing of the mission. There has been somehow a mistake. It cannot be. It would mean the going out of a lamp which you and I saw kindled,—it does not seem to me so very long ago.”
“It is a lifetime.”
The light died from the Bishop’s face, leaving on it all the cruelty of age. “Yes, a lifetime that is over,” for a moment his lips showed their palsied working, for a moment spoke an old man’s querulousness, “they could not have closed the mission without my knowing it, if they had not thought me, already, laid upon the shelf!”
“Henry,” she pleaded, “not that, please!”
“No, not that!” he cried, instantly himself and contrite, “we pass, but the work goes on! I am an old man who has somehow made a failure of it. But I’ll try not to think of that any more, clouding our Christmasing. I’ll try just to remember I am leaving Murray Newbold and Westbury, the two I have loved, to you.”
“Leaving! But, Henry, you speak as if I were not also old! What time have I left, for Newbold, for Westbury, more than you?”
“You will have time,” he answered, while the mysticism again touched his face, “my head is not clear to-day, but that is one of the things I seem to know, that you will have time, more than I. Time enough to help Newbold to learn his own strength. He has never tried it. Time enough to teach him to fight. A soldier, he’ll not desert,—afterwards. And time enough to help Westbury rekindle the mission, whose death would mean—you and I know,” his voice fell and he groped a little for words, a little confused, “the light must not die, you will have time to keep the light, to keep Westbury—alive. Your Westbury and mine! I seem to know to-day,” his low voice, in the twilight, was very clear, “that you will have time to help the man and the town I have failed to help.”
“If time were all that is needed, Henry, to help them!”
Looking into the fire, he did not turn, answering happily, “Whatever else is needed you possess, and have given to me for sixty years.”
With the snapping of a lifetime’s tension her voice rang, “Henry, stop looking into the fire! For sixty years you have looked into dreams. Now, once, look at me!”
The Bishop turned.
Her elfin laugh tinkled, “The fairies were good to you, Henry, they gave you eyes that do not see.”
While she spoke, slowly the Bishop saw, but at first he saw only a girl’s witch-face in the fire glow.
“I will make you see this once, Henry Collinton—me! You look strange, Henry! As if you couldn’t guess what’s coming. Neither, I assure you, can I. You called me Lucy Dwight of the long ago,—and you’ll have to take the consequences! I like you to look strange, for then you don’t look old! Look young, Henry, and look at me! You are looking, I believe, at last, with open eyes,—looking at a woman, not a diocese. Henry, I might say in passing that I did not think once, on one afternoon we both recall,—but differently!—when we talked about a mission, that we should still be talking about that mission after sixty years. You will excuse my changing the subject from your work for a few moments, then, after sixty years! I’ve been a pretty good listener—take your turn!”
She looked no longer at the Bishop, who watched her as if she were some Christmas sprite risen out of the red hearth. Her white old face, white-crowned, was touched to rose and gold by the fire flame.
“Shall I draw you a portrait, Henry, of someone you have never seen? Yet it is a portrait on constant exhibition. It is shown to every guest in Westbury,—a private exhibition is called High Tea at Mrs. Hollister’s. People watch the guest when he sees the portrait; by its effect he is judged. People point out that the portrait is valuable historically, since it combines inseparably the style of sixty years ago with the style of to-day. That is because the picture has been retouched so carefully from year to year to fit the taste of the times. So the painting is seen to represent the sixty-year history of a town, even to costume,” she flashed a white hand from throat to skirt of her clinging black which looked at first sight so fresh from a fashion plate and was so carefully studied to fit no decade, and no person, but her own.
“Who would ever have thought Lucy Dwight could have stepped into a picture and stayed there all her life? She did not expect to, once, but she made up her mind to it, later, when one day she looked in the glass and took stock of what was left to her. She was twenty then.
“I am proud of the portrait, frankly. I have enjoyed making it. I haven’t had anything else to do, except, of course,” a ripple of laughter ran through her tone, “to listen! The portrait needed a frame, so I’ve made that, too. Your figure of speech was inaccurate, a while ago. I am not Westbury. Westbury is the frame; I am the portrait, the portrait of an interesting old woman, interesting to everybody but herself!”
Lucy was an artist, she knew the value of the pause, she knew the value of a shrug, the most delicate perceptible lifting of brows and shoulders, she knew the value of hands, that, out of periods of quiet, flickered now and then, spirit-white against the black shadows of her gown. An artist, she forgot the Bishop while she talked and did not look upon the change that grew upon his face.
“It is very easy to be interesting. It only needs that you always guess what people are going to say next and never let them guess what you are going to say next. It needs a gift for words and a gift for silence. It was the process by which I brought up my children. My children have always known they did not know their mother, a course of training easier than spanking and more efficacious.” She stopped a moment. Her clasped hands tightened, “Yet in ultimate effect, at seventy-seven, a little lonely. We prefer our Christmases apart, my children and I.” Her words fell clear against a long silence following, “My husband, of course, spoiled the children. I was perfectly willing that he should; they were his children.”
After a pause, the Bishop, bringing the words forth from far away murmured, musing, “Fathers do spoil children, perhaps.”
Her tone turned tense, “I would have spoiled Nan!” then, resuming her gaze into the fire, upon her portrait, she continued her retrospective analysis, “And I have managed the town as I have managed my family. What Mrs. Hollister says, what Mrs. Hollister does not say, about ministers and missions, about dinners and diners, Westbury waits to know, and I have never let it be quite, quite sure! So Westbury watches, watches me—but oh, not as I watch Westbury! For it would be a little curious and disquieting—if I should cease to be popular! I don’t think that unpopularity would exactly suit—my physique! I am old and accustomed to sovereignty, even if it is, well, a bit monotonous! We were young and lively once, Westbury and I, but now we grow old and wish to be complacent and comfortable, so we don’t poke at each other’s consciences. And, indeed, why should we? For are we not pretty good, when one stops to look at us!” Patriotism deepened her voice, “Where is there another Westbury! We have kept the heritage of our fathers! We have not grown cheap in Westbury!” Then a lighter tone, “And how could we be very bad when we always have had you to idealize us! Ever since you were a boy! You came to us a stranger and we took you in, at once. We sometimes do take in the stranger at once, and sometimes never. Nowadays he must be presented to the portrait, and must pass that examination. Young Murray Newbold has never passed his, and he knows it. I believe I rather like to see him squirm, for it is not petty, it is a giant’s squirming, and I enjoy it because I fancy it has ceased to be perceptible to any eye but mine. It is interesting to observe the effect of the air of Westbury on some constitutions. Your young Newbold would have been worth bringing up once, but he has never learned not to be afraid, and that brings it about that he has parted with every good quality he possesses except his brain. That is still with us, fortunately, for, quite between us, in spite of patriotism, I must say there are not many brains in active employment in Westbury in these days (I’m not, of course, so impolitic as to say ‘in these days’ to anyone but you, Henry!). We have about half-a-dozen brains in Westbury capable of conversation,—yours and young Newbold’s and mine, I forget the other three!” Her laugh died into a thoughtful pause.
“And yet a brain for a woman is a big stupidity. But perhaps I ought not to quarrel with mine, for,” she drew a quick breath of intensity, “it has given me all I’ve ever had! Oh, you and I have had some great old talks, haven’t we, here by my old red fire! Brains make—at least—good comradeship!” Her voice fell low, “I sometimes wonder if there is anything better for—men and women—than good comradeship. What—what do you think, Henry?” But still she looked into the fire and not at him, and the Bishop did not answer. For a moment his deep gaze upon her wavered, went to the blackening window,—below there in the wintry garden long bleak stems broke aflame with wee yellow blossoms, beneath them little brown Annie walked among the roses.
“How curiously that holly glistens, Henry!” Lucy’s eyes were upon the long lean hands transparent to the fire glow, then suddenly in a voice lingering and judicial, “I really do not know whether it is so very interesting after all to be an interesting old woman!”
Lucy’s hands unclasped, fluttered an instant on the chair arms, then lay still, “Oh, I am bored! And I have been bored for so long! It would astonish this town of mine to know how it bores me! There is nothing new for me anywhere! I know what everybody is going to say and do. If it were not for you, I should even know what I myself am going to say and do! Oh, dull, dull, dull,—this being old! I wish I had something to do! I don’t even yet feel old enough to do nothing, yet when have I ever done anything else?”
The fire snapped in the stillness of the room, embers leaping up, the sooner to die to blackened ashes. Lucy’s voice grew low and vibrant.
“You wonder why I speak these things to-day? It is your own fault, Henry, my friend! Why do I keep my hearth fire bright except that you should drop in beside it and talk to me? It is quite the only thing left that is entertaining. And to-day you yourself threaten that!” Her voice fell low, “Christmas has always been my day, why this time do you bring with you these terrible thoughts, this talk of—death! Why talk of it, the thinking of it is bad enough! Did anyone ever hear me talk of dying? Except, of course, my lawyer. No, when death takes me, he must catch me first! I shall never go forth to meet him with plans and preparations for the things that shall come after,—and why should you? Why must you talk of your going, speaking as if I could have an interest in your work without you! Oh, Henry, why did you yourself bring the spectre to our Christmas fire, where I wanted to be snug and warm! You are not afraid, but I—I regret to confess it, I am!” Then her tone grew less intense, determinedly casual, “Yet it is curious that I should care or really take the trouble to be afraid! I who am bored to the uttermost! The other will be at least a new thing! But I have never been fond of games of chance! A picture in a frame is dead enough, but a coffin is—ugh!—slightly worse! It is so ugly, this dying! Nobody can ever say I yielded to it before I had to—I have yielded so far, I flatter myself, to nothing! Yet when I must, I shall step into my carriage and drive off with my head up and my lips shut, like a lady! As I have lived!”
She paused, momentarily conscious of his expression, so that to the strange intentness of his watching face she went on, “I never have yielded to the need of a confessional before; if I do so once in a lifetime, you really must excuse me, Henry!
“Of course, for you it is different, you are not afraid; you are a man, and then you have your religion. But a woman is rarely religious, at least a woman who has not had what she wanted! As a thinking person, I quite envy you your religion. It is a valuable possession, at this end of life. Not that I am unorthodox—who is, in our good old churchly Westbury? I am a good churchwoman,—that does not enable me to see through a stone wall. Oh, Henry, Henry, here you come to-day, looking so pale that I can’t bear it, and talking of going, passing on, leaving your work! You have made me feel how near we are, you and I, to that stone wall. I am sitting here shivering at the strange things on the other side!”
No light but the ebbing fire and the clear green lamp, and somewhere outside in the darkness stars above the swift rush of the river.
“It is this that makes me talk. The time is so short, here, and over there—who knows about over there? One speaks out at last, I find, after being good for sixty years. For I have been good, have I not, Henry, for sixty years,—listened and listened, helped, as you believe, your work? It has been a great thing to be jealous of so great a work! Did you really think my mind was in it, that I really cared,—I!—for missions, for making men over, for turning a town right about face!
“I never expected to speak out; pictures in frames do not expect to speak out. Yet I might have known, for sooner or later everyone does speak out to you. I’ve been rather proud of being the one exception. But is it not my turn? And yours to listen, to me, just once, at last? You are surprised, I suppose. I am afraid I do not care that you are. I had to open your eyes. You speak as if I existed only to carry on your work—it has always been like that. So I’ve drawn you a portrait. Do you still think, looking at it, that I am the one to give you hope, I! What do you think, Henry Collinton, of the portrait of Lucy Dwight?”
Her strangely gleaming eyes at last met the Bishop’s deep gaze, profound, unfaltering. There was stillness, then the Bishop spoke, in quiet judgment on himself, “My work? Yet I had hoped that it seemed God’s. And for sixty years I have thought that you loved it!”
“I have loved you!”
There was no old age for them now, no past, no future. Beyond the room that briefly held them were night and the river and death. She was Lucy Dwight of the flickering fire flame, who laid bare at the last her deathless desire. The man she loved was God’s, was all men’s. After a lifetime of delicate sanity, she cried out to him to be for one hour hers. Then she waited.
The singular clarity of the Bishop’s brain had annulled for him every other emotion. He no longer felt any shock of revelation. The lucidity of his thinking was like a physical sensation of actual daylight in the room and beyond the windows. He saw the past as if it had been written in a foreign tongue and with a new meaning, but he saw it as plainly as black print on white paper. The woman before him was one whom he had never known, but he read her soul, too, clear as a printed page. So strangely clear his head, it seemed to him he could have laid his hand on that wall of death Lucy had talked of, that it would have crumbled at his touch, leaving him standing on the other side, in this same new daylight, serene and unsurprised. So crystal his thoughts that words seemed to him a remote and frivolous medium, like a grown man’s being forced to rediscover his baby-lisp in order to make himself understood. His personal pain had become merely a matter for reflection and limpid analysis. Carried far on thought that ran deep and wide, the Bishop spoke, hardly conscious of his words, “But love loves! It does not hurt! You knew me and my faith in you and my hope through you. If you had loved me, would you have destroyed for me that faith and hope? Would you not have taken from my hand my boy and my town, to take care of and to help, if you had loved me?”
They seemed to sit there as if looking on these words, in a silence that grew palpitant. Then her cry broke, “Henry, I can be all that you have believed, I can promise to try to do all that you desire. If you ask me to do it for you! Do you?”
All in that strange daylight within his brain, the Bishop saw the future, saw his work die with him. In the same white light he saw the woman before him whom he had never known.
Lucy waited. God’s or hers? Yet why had she loved him except because he had never been hers? The Bishop’s gaze rested upon her in a far tranquillity of insight.
“No.”
He sat there, quiet as a portrait before her gaze, and all alone. She had desired to rouse him from bodily weakness, and there was about him now no taint of feebleness. He sat erect, his long hands tranquil but not flaccid. A smile touched his lips, so fine and firm, a man’s smile, not a child’s; a smile of thought in retrospect, neither bright nor bitter. He had believed his lonely life cheered by a beautiful friendship, so sacred that he had supposed it hallowed the shrines of his God, of his wife, even as he did. This friendship had not been what he thought it. Truth was well. He had no friend. There remained God.
“Henry!”
He looked over to her with a far, alien pity.
“Have I lost you, Henry? I was never mad before. To keep you I have been for a lifetime so frightfully wise! Have I lost you now?”
Involuntarily he shut his eyes, the faintest line was pencilled between his brows. Pain struck home again through all that serenity of light. If there was one thing Henry Collinton, the man, loved, it was reserve, the delicate stateliness of their mutual sympathy. Yet here was the nakedness of a woman’s soul! Words seemed to him too far away to find or utter.
“Henry, sometimes you seem to me to see only God!”
Still he sat before her, silent and motionless as a portrait statue, as austere and beautiful. His face was in profile to her. The firelight fell on his silver-white hair and filled the eyes that did not turn or see her. Still she seemed to him changed into a stranger. But her words sounded in his head, “Sometimes you seem to see only God!” The Bishop put up his right hand to his brow, suddenly veiling his face from her. Against the strange recoil from her his quick prayer throbbed. So long Lucy gazed at that corded old hand that shut him from her that there grew at last on her face also, a marble sternness that matched his own. She was no longer beautiful beneath that blighting cynicism. Behind his lifted hand, the Bishop did not guess his testing, alone with God as he sat there, praying against this quivering repulsion of his soul. At last Lucy’s eyes turned from him to the fire. The smile of a faint scorn caught on her lips! Scorn for herself? Scorn for him? Sixty years of loving? Was this its issue?
Silence, except for the whispering fire.
The Bishop dropped his hand, leaning back a moment in uttermost relief. From head to foot, he felt, all quietly, some stern tension relaxed, and with it there passed away also something of that intensely clear vision he had just experienced. Looking now toward that other chair by the fire, he knew it was no stranger but the old familiar Lucy seated there, his friend, and how tired she looked and white and lonely! He must try to understand. It was very strange to realize it all, but step by step he must try to understand, even though he felt again now suddenly, and far more certainly, the shutting in upon him of the vagueness and dullness of the morning hours. He cried out to the Friend to hold it at bay a little while that he might talk to Lucy. He smiled over to her sunnily.
As she looked into his eyes that blighting scorn was transformed into a tremulous new beauty, her brooding face suddenly puckered with the painful tears of age.
“Henry, tell me how to live without you! Give it to me this Christmas Day, that gift of hope!”
“I would,” he answered slowly, “if I could! But I haven’t been so very successful in my gift-giving to-day. So I don’t feel very sure of myself. You’ll be patient, won’t you, while I try to understand?” Slowly and humbly he felt his way, with wistful pauses. “There is so much that is new to me, to understand.” Deep in thought he gazed into the past. “You have been very patient with me. I see now how often I have been self-absorbed and selfish, bringing it all to you, every worry. I have taken,—I see it now—much sympathy and given very little. It’s a little late, isn’t it, after sixty years, to ask you to excuse it?” He shook his head with a strange, sad little smile. “How I have talked to you! Always! It must indeed have seemed to you a long, long listening! I am sorry!”
“But I am not sorry, Henry!”
“No!” his face brightened. “For if I have been self-absorbed, you at least can remember that you have been very good to me. That helps, does it not?” he pleaded quickly. “That thought helps a little toward cheer? For as I try to understand, I do not seem able to look back and read my life without you. You have always strengthened me. You have never failed me.”
“Until to-day?”
Her whisper sent a shiver of hurt along his lips, but in a moment he achieved steadiness, holding self at bay. “That!” his breath caught, then low words that grew calm, “But as you said, it is perhaps my turn now, to listen to you. It is only fair, as you said, that I should listen and see, at last.”
“I never meant you to see. I always knew what would happen if you did.” Her voice throbbed through the dusky room, with strange finality, “And now it has happened!”
His eyes met hers, crystal clear, “Nothing has happened,” he said simply; “I think nothing ever happens, does it, to friends?”
There was a strange wondering relief upon her keen white face, as she listened for his words, seeing the old boyish mysticism brighten in his eyes. “But let me keep on trying to understand. They cannot be very easy to bear, the things you have been telling me about, all that I have been so dull and slow to guess. It will never do for either of us to let Christmas day go out in the blues. The air seemed full of good cheer this morning; we mustn’t lose that, you and I, just because we are being drawn into the evening. You have been cheer itself to me through all these years; if only I knew the word to say to you now! My thoughts don’t feel very clear or manageable, but you know I want to find the right word! You who have always known what to say to me.” He fell thoughtful and silent, then looked up quickly, “You see it was for that reason that I couldn’t help asking you to look after Murray, because I knew what you had done for me. I have had every hope for him, and you know how hard it is for me to give up a thing I have hoped for,—that is why I caught at your friendship for him as the one security now. I thought perhaps there would be for you the pleasure in his brain, in his strength, that I have felt. But no, now I see it cannot be. It would all be too hard on you. I know, of course,” he sighed, “Murray’s faults. I’ve cared too much for him not to know them; that was another reason, my love for him, that made me want to feel that I was leaving him to you, to help him through—what lies before him. But now I see it would be painful and difficult for you—one man who has always brought you all the worry of his work has been enough! And even to-day I have been bringing it all to you still, troubling you with my work and worry and Murray and Westbury! Lucy, believe me, I never meant to be selfish with it! I see at last that I have been.
“And Westbury,—shall we leave that subject quiet, too, as being troublesome to-day? And the Southside Mission and all the other missions, and the spirit that enkindles them, and must be kept alive here and everywhere—one tries to keep the fire alight, but one must go some day, trusting, hoping, not knowing, for that is too much to ask! I will try not to trouble you with all that, any more, to-day. It was a good deal, wasn’t it, to ask you to keep a whole town—alive! One of my dreams! Such incorrigible dreams they must seem to you, I’m afraid. I am always looking into dreams, you said. And perhaps my Westbury is all a dream, for it has always seemed to me one of the holy places. It does not seem, when you talk, to be that to you. You see, I thought we were one in our love for it,—that is why I talked of leaving it to you—it all sounds now, doesn’t it, a little fantastic? Have I always lived in fantasy then? Are you showing me truth at the last, Lucy?”
His voice ceased, weary. His face looked forth from the shadow depths, worn to silver-white by all the years, then, even as he paused, hope ran across it a bright transforming hand.
“It cannot be true! It need not be true! Need it, Lucy? I seem to see—forgive me one more dream,—Murray with you to help him, still keeping Westbury the Westbury of our youth. Of our youth! The old customs, the way of graceful living, you have kept! And now to keep the spirit, the spirit of the place, its simple godliness, its simple friendliness! It has seemed to me God’s ground, where He let me walk a little while and serve and then pass on, hoping! Hoping, Lucy?
“For you, there is so much left!” he spoke a bit wistfully. “Such vigor still and life left in you! It does not matter if the years left are few and late, if they can be so strong and beautiful! While, as for me—” he shook his head, shrugging his shoulders, smiling, “oh, these poor old bodies that we wear, how they fetter and confine! Yet we mustn’t scorn them too much either, poor things, when they’ve done their best for us for eighty years!”
Something in her listening face recalled him, “Dear me, I am at it again! Troubling you again with the things that shall come after. It was only that I saw before you for a moment—so much! I seem to see so much everywhere, to-day. And yet much of it is sadly jumbled. Your brain never seems to play these sorry tricks on you. You’re feeling patient still, aren’t you,” he smiled, “while I try still to remember and understand?”
Slowly keenness grew in his gaze upon her face, mute before him and subtle. His words were a little hesitant, “I do not believe it is quite true, that figure of a portrait. It hurts us both to think about that portrait, because it is not true. Truly, I think my idea was better than that, that you are the spirit of the place. Yes, I prefer my figure of speech to yours, and so I shall keep it and forget yours. We have known each other too long to believe in that portrait,—it’s such a lonesome notion, somehow! Perhaps you feel like a portrait yourself sometimes when you’re sitting alone by the fire and feeling a little down, as we all do sometimes, I’m afraid, but you surely couldn’t expect me to believe you a picture in a frame when for a lifetime you’ve seemed life and energy to me! So remember,” an instant his voice grew lower, “always remember—” the old twinkle showed, “that I don’t believe a word of it!”
He knew that her eyes, at full gaze on him, frankly showed all secrets, but they were secrets he was not sure he read. Still he was trying to understand, while he paused for help.
“You did not quite mean, did you, that the dullness, the boredom, is all the time present with you? Only sometimes? It is very puzzling to believe ennui of you who seem so alert. You are very brave at concealing it,—you must know the remedy better than I do, for it is one of the things that have not been chosen for me to bear, for I still get up in the morning expecting new things to happen. I did this very day.”
Involuntary mocking pulled at her lips. “New things are happening to us both to-day!”
“Yes!” he murmured, while his face was shadowed, then reverting, “To be dull every day! It seems to me almost the saddest thing you have said to me! I wish it were not so! I wish I had the right word to say for that!”
He sat silent, hesitant and doubtful.
“Henry, say out to me all that you have in mind to say. I need it. There are no veils left!”
His face grew clear with light.
“You are looking into dreams again!” she cried, “but now tell me what you see!”
“What I see for you?”
“Yes, that belongs to me now.”
“I think I see for you what might be,” he began hesitant. “Mysteriously, there is in you still the power of effort together with the power of wisdom. It seems to me that it is like a cup in your hand, your influence. And if it should be all in vain,—I know to-day that much we desire to do must be in vain. We understand that together, you and I. I feel, you know, as if the soul of a man and the soul of a town were in your keeping for a little while,—if you should take them, might it not be that new thing you want? Might it not bring you joy and forgetting? My work has meant that to me. And I know it is very lonely if one never forgets. And even if it were all in vain, might it not be life and hope to you, Lucy? I do not want to preach any preachments, you know that, surely. I can only tell you what I have lived. Perhaps I have never lived in reality—I half guess it this evening, looking back, and looking forward, seeing all that I have not done. It isn’t very easy to grow old, not easy for anyone to feel the body breaking beyond mending, and to see all that is unfinished, but I believe, Lucy, an enthusiasm is the one thing to keep us warm, us old ones. I’ve done a plentiful amount of failing, but I wish I could succeed in one thing now,—I wish God would let me give you the word of joy to-night!”
It was so quiet in the old room, that low-lighted space, four-square, swung out upon the night. The Bishop’s long fingers passed slowly across his brow, trying to smooth away that darkness which seemed shutting in upon his brain.
“And might not effort new and different help you to forget, Lucy, that wall of death? Perhaps you might be so busy, so joyously busy, that you would come quite to the wall without seeing, and the gate would open so quickly that you would step through without waiting to be afraid. I wish God might let it be that way with you. Perhaps He will. Strange that for me death has always seemed easier than life, so that I’ve tried not to look at the thought of it too much, not because of fear, because of beauty. It is only lately that I have felt that God will not mind if I look toward the gate. I think perhaps he’ll excuse me now, for wanting to get home. They’ve been waiting for me pretty long, too, Annie and Nan and the baby. He must be a man now. I often wonder by what ways they grow up over there.
“Lucy, I wish you need not be afraid of going home.”
Again the Bishop passed his hand over his forehead. He felt himself growing vague, tried blindly to remember what he was trying to say, turned to her at length, appealing, with a strange little smile of apology.
“There is something I am trying to say, but somehow I keep losing it. Can you possibly excuse me if you try quite hard? For I know you’ve told me something this afternoon that I ought never to have forgotten, and somehow, Lucy, it’s gone, it fades, it escapes me! Only it was something that troubled you and that I was trying to understand. But I can’t, I can’t remember! But I wanted to say something to help a little, I remember that part of it. Lucy, for you and me, is that enough, even if I can’t remember what it was all about?
“There is just one thing I can find the words for, before they slip away,—you and I have had to walk through life alone, and yet we have walked together. It was because God walked with us that we have walked together. Lucy, you will remember, whatever happens, that He is always there? And so, that way, you see, we can never be so very far apart!”
They are piteous, the tears of age. Lucy pressed them back with ivory finger-tips on each eyelid, her hands masking all her face. Behind them stretched the long past, the brief future. The key to the future was in her broken whisper, “After all, God was just; Annie was fit to love you!”
But the Bishop had risen suddenly, and crossed the room blindly, stumbling but once. The crashing pain in his head left only one instinct—air, the street, his own house! Instantly he must get there! Then sharp through his own pain came admonishment. He steadied himself with one hand upon the mahogany table where the green lamp stood. It was the close of his Christmas, he remembered; would it go with no reassurance?
The white panelled doorway behind him, he stood there by the low green lamp. His face was all longing, like a little child’s.
“Lucy, I tried; have I given you—hope?”
The Bishop’s voice was low, lower than he knew, and it is sometimes impossible to hear or to speak. It was a long time before Lucy’s hands dropped from a face a-quiver. She looked about, startled to know herself alone when she felt only him, everywhere.
But quietly the outer door had closed.