The Christmas Bishop by Winifred Kirkland - HTML preview

PART IV

Stars thridded the bare elm-boughs overhead. Always against the blackness of the next corner loomed a blurred ball of light, which, on approach, turned into a familiar street lamp. The broad avenue was almost deserted. From blurred light to light ran a space of pavement blessedly firm to hurrying, uncertain feet, yet lights and pavement seemed to multiply and stretch away indefinitely. But if one hurried, hurried on, there was someone waiting at the end.

Sometimes, against the dark faces of the housefronts, window-shades were rolled up, like eyelids opening, on home-pictures that reminded the Bishop it was Christmas night. The morning of the day gleamed through mist like one of the street lamps he was passing. Faces kept forming close against his eyes and then melted again into gray, into black, Mrs. Graham’s and Murray’s and Lucy’s, suffering, lonely faces that had been locked against his pleading. Now there only remained to get home.

A street of black housefronts, closed upon good cheer within, the Bishop’s own street, any door of which would have opened readily to his need, had anyone guessed it! But illness had left in his brain only a great homing instinct. He knew he must not stop along the way, because like all other men in all the world on Christmas-night, he, too, had his own, and there, at home, his own were waiting for him. For at last he knew why he was hurrying so, it was because Annie was there, at home. He might not find her below in the hall, but she would be upstairs, listening for him and waiting. He knew that when his key turned, he should hear her voice, liquid and sweet with welcome, come floating down the shadowy stair, “Up here! I’m up here, Hal!”

Yet when at length the Bishop did press his key into the lock, the house was silent and the hallway unlighted and chilly. Still Annie’s presence seemed all-pervasive, catching him back to older days, and making him, as he groped for a match and lighted the gas-jet, forget to wonder why Mrs. Graham had not returned or to surmise the train missed for the baby’s sake. As he hung overcoat and hat on a peg of the towering black-walnut rack, his face being reflected to unseeing eyes in the glimmering mirror, the familiarity of the action and the security of his own hallway and open study door steadied and strengthened him. He had got home safe and sound after all, and now before climbing up to bed and undertaking all the weariness of undressing, he would put on his old black velvet dressing gown, and would sit down in the dark, in the sagging old leather armchair, and rest a little, and look out on the stars in the band of night-sky stretching below the rim of the piazza roof.

The door into the hall, slightly ajar, allowed a little light to enter the room, showing the seated figure facing the long eastward window, the black velvet gown sweeping from throat to foot, and the long pale hands stretching out on the chair arms from the wide black cuffs. Hair and profiled face gleamed silver-white in the gloom. From to time the Bishop’s right hand moved to pull the folds more closely over his knees, unconsciously, for he did not know that he was cold. Down below, under the rear piazza, at the grated iron door of the basement kitchen, the man who tended the furnace had set the whirring bell sounding again and again, but all unheeded. The two maids, returning, rang and knocked at all the doors, only to go away, baffled. The Bishop heard no sounds from without.

Near the Bishop’s left hand, the corner by the window where the Friend was standing always harbored Annie’s work basket. It stood on three bamboo legs, an ample, covered basket, in which the old darning cotton was still, as long ago, a little tangled. Looking toward that little workstand the Bishop remembered that it was Annie he was sitting up to wait for. She was coming in very soon. Or was it Nan he was awaiting? Or someone else?

The flowing lines of the Nazarene’s talith melted into the folds of the long curtain close to which He was standing. He was looking forth, together with the Bishop, on the Bishop’s town, where he had failed. Too tired to think about that any more, the Bishop only knew that the Friend understood failure. The little quick upward smile showed like a spent child’s, too tired to do anything but trust.

Yet the Bishop’s thought, in retrospect upon his Christmas Day, was strangely clear, as he looked out on that familiar picture, white stars above in the night-blue and, below, the blackness gemmed by ruddier earth-lights. So dark now, yet so bright with sun and hope in the Christmas morning! His thought went out to the unseen houses, each holding a little group of his friends, following them to the bend of the river until his fancy walked once more among the tenements where he knew the brown babies with their great black eyes, his friends, too.

Of late he had so often looked out on his little city wrapped in night, but not as now. Before, he had been thinking of his Christmas gift, the House of Friendship, which should, in the terms of some strange symbolism, give back to Westbury the beauty it had once given him. But this was not to be. He was quite clear about it all, and quiet. It was night now, and he had not done any of the things he had meant to do in the morning. He had not even gone to church. God’s chalice! He had not been able on this Christmas Day to offer it to one soul in all his Westbury!

All day long his hands had been baffled of their gift-giving. That was sometimes God’s way, the Bishop knew, as he leaned back in this strange, expectant peace. Suddenly, sharp as paintings torch-lit against a gloom, there passed before him again, as on the black street, those three faces out of his Christmas Day: Mrs. Graham’s, black hate scarcely lighted by love for that little Christmas baby; Newbold’s, storm-tossed upon a struggle that gave no presage of victory; and Lucy’s, seamed with the subtleties of a loneliness that could not see the only help for lonely living. These three faces were, God in his mystery had showed him to-day, only the symbols of his larger failure, in his town, in his diocese. His little garden space hedged in for him out of all the world, he had tended it with much love but with little wisdom. So God would have to take care of it now.

Sharp again, just as the three faces had flashed forth out of darkness and passed close against the Bishop’s eyes, came other visions and pictures, those of his Christ-child poem of the morning. Only now it was no sacred city of the Orient, but the dumb and sleeping streets of Westbury where the Child went wandering. As before, he knocked, all eager, and again opening doors flashed ruddy on the night, to close again with a low dull sound. On and on he fled, a glimmering baby-form blown on the winter wind, until the Bishop’s eyes closed wearily from following. He opened them with a twitch of pain, and there without, close against the dark sash the Child was standing, not sad at all, but sweet and smiling. Then instantly this picture, like the others, faded, and again the Bishop knew himself with the familiarity of unnumbered silent nights like this one, seated alone in his study, quiet with the peace of the Friend. Through all the solitary hours of all the solitary years, the Friend had always stood there, clear-figured, by the eastward window.

The night was wearing on as the Bishop sat, waiting. Very soon they would be there. He remembered that he had been looking for them all the day. It would be very cosy to have them coming in on Christmas night—his own!

But at the chiming of those two words through his brain, thought sharply asserted itself, keen and crystalline in retrospect. As a man brings all his life to God at the end, the Bishop looked into the Nazarene’s eyes from the picture of the little city that belonged to them both, whispering, “But those out there have been my own.”

Presently the silvered head sank back in the sudden drowsiness that falls upon the very old, but even as he yielded to it, the Bishop’s eyelids flickered an instant. He looked again toward the Friend, forever clear against the curtained window. He lifted his right hand a little, like a child, not knowing how confident it was. Too tired and sleepy to be conscious of anything at all but that Presence that filled all the room, the Bishop murmured happily, “And I have not been lonely!”

The Bishop did not actually doze off, however, but sat resting quietly in the peaceful borderland of sleep. The threadbare house that harbored him was very silent. From time to time, across his dim worn face, fancies flickered, bright as a caged bird’s dreaming. Out of the engulfing vagueness of his brain, Annie came to him, the child-woman of long ago. His boat was rocking at the little pier waiting, as she came tripping down the terraces. He saw the upward sweep of the round young arms as she opened the high wrought-iron gate. She wore a white muslin sprigged with yellow, wide-skirted and flounced. The live brown of her hair was swept back into a net. Her face was soft olive and rose, her lips parted, and the eyes grave and steady, a child’s. On either side about the high black portals of the gate pulsed and flamed wee yellow roses. Slim, sturdy boy that he was, something had shaken him in that moment like a tossed leaf. Even now, old and dim in his chair, it was not the sense of her lips beneath his sudden ones that he remembered; it was that there in that instant he saw her eyes change forever to a woman’s. And the boy, all a-quiver with strong youth as he was, he, too, in that moment had changed into a man, a man forever reverent before the mystery he had wakened. The Bishop’s hand tightened on the chair arm, for he remembered that at last, at last, Annie was coming back to him. He was waiting for her to come in.

Again thought shifted many a year; and he sat expectant of a knock, light, imperative, merry, Nan’s evening knock. The door swung in and she entered, that tall, slim girl of his. She wore a white dress girt about in the absurd panniers of the eighties. Her dark hair was looped low at her neck. She had her mother’s brooding brown eyes lightened by her father’s twinkle. She sank on a hassock at his knee, folding her long figure up in a trick of grace she had.

“Ready to hear a secret, father?”

As on so many, many evenings, he was ready to hear a secret, the secrets a motherless girl may tell to her father. The Bishop remembered still one secret she had told him which had seemed to be a fine silk thread cutting his heart in two, for the father, listening, knew that the man Nan loved was not worthy of her. Then a tiny smile touched the worn old lips, a smile of pride, half-jealous, at the memory that it was her father, not her husband, that Nan had first told about her little baby. The father’s blood, even now, beat faster at the thought of that remembered hope. Then again he saw the wee waxen form on Nan’s arm. But instantly mysterious glad expectancy swept that sight from him as he recalled that even now he was listening for Nan’s tap-tap at his study door, Nan, once more coming to tell him a secret, a secret blithe, unguessed.

The house had ceased to be silent; there were movings, stirrings, voices, through it. They seemed to be without, on the stairs, and above, in the upper rooms. There were people on the stairs, mounting up and up on jocund feet. The Bishop heard it perfectly clear now, Annie’s voice from his bedroom overhead, “Up here, I’m up here, Hal!”

But listen! There on the hallstair, that was surely a child he heard now! It was little Nan, chuckling and chattering as she climbed. It was her old merry challenge to her father to be out and after her as up she scampered. Yet no, that was not Nan, that merry call was a boy’s, a baby’s,—it was Nan’s baby-boy, who had just learned to go upstairs. The Bishop heard the small ecstatic feet, the slap of exultant little palms on each step achieved. And, like little Nan, the brave wee grandson meant the Bishop to follow him, as on he scurried, up and up, where the stairs were multiplied, were mounting, ever higher, higher.

Again the sounds on the stair changed to other footfalls, lighter, firmer, surer, but like the others, very glad; fleet and pattering, pattering, spirit-light, the steps of the little Christ-Child, going home.

A slight tremor ran through the length of the form seated there, silver and black. Suddenly all mist was wiped from the Bishop’s brain, leaving it clear. The Nazarene laid his hand on the window-sash, as if opening a door. “Rise!” He said, “Let us go forth into the morning.”

Beyond the silent house, Westbury slept on, the star-lit, throbbing city, not knowing. The deep sleep of the earliest dawn held those three faces of the Bishop’s failure, sleep of victors, spent with struggle. In the morning they would awaken, the three the Bishop had loved, to know! In the morning all Westbury would awaken, to know,—that there was only one way to love him now!

In the house of each heart that must perforce hold his memory like a shrine, there could never be any chamber for hate. Through the gift of his three years’ presence should the grandmother hold to her breast her baby’s baby, until love, overflowing, should enfold that black-mooded woman, her son’s wife, and both, being mothers, should learn the way of peace by guiding there the little feet of a little child. This, himself all unwitting, should be the Bishop’s immortal gift.

Even so, by divine largess of life given to life, should Murray Newbold become the Bishop’s spiritual son. Henceforth, always—instant, insistent—should the Bishop’s presence seem near him at every turning-point, compelling, as in the darkened study on that last day of all their days together.

And the woman who had loved the boy, Henry Collinton, she, too, through his gift of a beauty steadfast to the end, should in the last brief years find ease of her lifelong hunger. In unspoken kinship of loneliness must they draw near now, the man and the woman who had walked closest to him, to rear together his last wish. Deathless as dream should rise the House of Friendship, for, passing, the Bishop had found the way to give himself. It is only a little city where he offered the chalice of his spirit, and only a little space his whole bishopric, yet all the world is richer for the gift of his Christmas soul.

Westbury shall know now,—shining old face beneath the shabby hat, stooping old shoulders beneath the worn cape overcoat, spent old feet that walked these careless streets—Westbury shall know now, their Bishop, passed from them, their own forever.

Yet these things the Bishop did not know, for God was showing him more beautiful things, even as all his life He had been showing him the things that are more beautiful than fulfilment. All happily he sat there in his old study chair, looking toward the eastward window.

His face had changed to a beauty of light. Gently on the chair arms rested the lean old hands, as very softly the gray room brightened at the coming of the dawn.

THE END