THE CHRISTMAS BISHOP
[Illustration:
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
_See page 140_]
The Christmas Bishop
BY
WINIFRED KIRKLAND
_Author of “Introducing Corinna,” “The
Home-Comers,” etc._
ILLUSTRATED BY
LOUISE G. MORRISON
[Illustration]
BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1913
By SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
(Incorporated)
THE VAIL-BALLOU CO.,
BINGHAMTON, N. Y.
THE CHRISTMAS BISHOP
PART I
Christmas morning, blue-black, pricked with stars against the Bishop’s
window panes. Westbury lay asleep beside its curving river, the great
old houses with gardens that ran terraced to the bank, the churches,
the college, even the new teeming tenements at the bending of the
water, all lay asleep in the Christmas dawning. The Bishop alone was
awake, and against the darkness before his eyes pictures raced. He had
been a poet once, so long ago that when sometimes they sang his hymns
in church he had forgotten they were his, but he still kept the poet’s
trick of thinking in pictures during those strangely alert moments
between sleep and full awakening. The pictures fell into the march of a
poem.
It was a storied city built upon two hills cleft by a valley.
On the twin crests towered great palaces and a temple. Where the
hills sank toward the north, there were terraced streets and narrow
climbing byways. There were markets and booths and all the signs of
multitudinous life, but throughout all the place one heard no sound,
saw nothing that moved, yet one knew that the whole city throbbed with
the pulse-beats of innumerable homes. A gray pall hung low, as if the
abrupt Oriental dawn had been arrested; the gray dimmed the marble of
the palaces, and dulled the temple gold. In the silent gloom one waited.
One did not know whence he had come, the Child who was suddenly there,
in the streets of that city without stars, a sacred city once; but
wherever he knocked upon the portal, quickly all within woke to life,
and became a teeming, bustling household; again, when he withdrew, all
was once more silence and darkness.
He was a tiny child, barefoot and pale, some little lost waif from the
mountains who had come seeking his kinsfolk among the homes. So fast
he pattered over the pavement that his pale hair and his white tunic
streamed upon the wind. His little yearning hands stretched out showed
fair as a baby’s in that wintry twilight. Ever and again he knocked and
entered, and always, entering, his face flamed with hope, and always,
coming forth, he was sobbing, for he found no welcome.
On and on he went, while each black street along which he hurried was
stabbed ever and again by the opening and shutting of a ruddy door.
In the silence one heard it plain, the heavy sound of a door that
closed because it did not know him. At length he had passed the city
portals and was mounting the hill-slope that is Golgotha, a form all
pale upon the dark, blown hair and robe and pattering feet. There the
Child turned, for it seemed he was the little Prince of that city,
and all the folk his kin. Rising a-tiptoe he stretched out his hands,
cross-wise, to them in love, and suddenly the sun, withheld, leaped
kingly above the hills beyond Jordan, and the silent air was full of
wings and of voices, the chant of the Christmas angels singing home the
Homeless One, and in that flood of light and song all that city knew
the Child they had lost their own, forever.
Slowly, before the Bishop’s eyes, that gold radiance dimmed into the
bleak gray twilight that was stealing over his room. Sharp as life
shall strike at visions came a sound from below that struck the dreamy
smile from his lips, leaving a twitching pain; certain sounds had that
power of intolerable renewal. A homely enough sound, merely the thud
of a lid dropped upon a flour bin, but it seemed now to be a flour bin
in a doll-house pantry in their first Rectory, his and Annie’s. He
would seek her there before going out to his parish calls. She would be
standing with her back to him, hands deep in dough, and would turn to
him her cheek, olive that always went rose beneath his kiss. He could
still hear the catch of her breath as she whispered good-by, for Annie,
deeply joyous, had yet always treated joy a little apprehensively,
as if knowing it would not last so very long. Looking back over many
years, the Bishop thought how young Annie had been when she died, and
Nan had been younger still. Nan! There it was again! That flash of hot
pain through his head, followed by a numbing dullness, even stranger
to bear. He had felt this several times of late. The Bishop ran a hand
over his forehead. He seemed to be floating far, without thought, yet
this was not sleep. Slowly, slowly, he drew back, but his thoughts
were heavy, not clear. He seemed to lie there waiting, waiting for
something. Surely thus he had always waited on Christmas morning. He
listened. It would come in a moment. There! A scurry along the hall,
the clatter of the door-handle, a rush, a jump, curls, lips, bubbling
chuckles, little cold toes to be warmed in his hand! Hear the shouts
and the singing of her, feel the pummelling of her little hands!
“Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!” shrilling straight up to the angels!
Was she not Christmas joy turned mad, his little girl!
He was full awake now. His lips formed a word. We are very weary of old
pain repeated when we whisper out to God like that.
The Bishop wondered why people say that one grows used to loss, and
that old age grows dull in feeling. Still he had got used to it, of
course. This was Christmas, too; it was quite natural that he should
feel it more on Christmas. He must be a little patient then with
himself about it, perhaps, on Christmas. Yet when had there been a day
when he had not missed them, his own!
The Bishop turned toward the eastward window, and on his gray and
beautiful face fell the gray and beautiful morning, for the Bishop was
one who had made God a habit, so that he turned to Him instinctively
without thinking about it at all. And since also he was a man of quick
visual imagination he thought of God quite simply: he saw Him standing
there, between the bed and the brightening window, in the form of a
young Jewish rabbi. He always stood there, to greet the Bishop’s day.
Together they always went about, step matching step, so that the Bishop
was never a lonely man. To himself he always thought of the Nazarene as
the Friend, because, so he thought, it was by loneliness that Jesus had
learned how to love. Since the Bishop always thought in words and in
pictures, it seemed to him that the Friend said to him now, “Rise. Let
us go forth into the morning. It is Christmas. It is the day of giving.”
While he dressed, the Bishop still knew God standing there, but felt
rather than seen, being lost sometimes in mist and dizziness. The
spaces in the room were strange; it was a very long journey to the
washstand, and the white window squares seemed to advance and then
recede. The Bishop could see his brush plainly enough on the bureau
scarf, but it was a long time before he could make his hand reach it.
He had to smile quaintly at himself at last, for he was sitting on
the bed mechanically counting the flower baskets in the worn Brussels
carpet, flower baskets that ran diagonally to the chair holding his
coat. Groping a little, the Bishop achieved the coat, then stood
trembling. Undoubtedly he was ill that morning, but Mrs. Graham should
not know it! For he must go out, he must go to church, there was no
service in all the year so dear to him as the Christmas communion at
St. John’s. He would force his blurring head to go through with it,
and Mrs. Graham should not keep him in! Keep him in! A frown twitched
on his forehead, an old man’s helplessness at the thought of coddling.
Why should a woman he had known but three years be so solicitous over
his health, dictating about his rubbers and his socks--he was not ill,
nor was he so very old! At that his brow cleared in a sunny flash of
amusement, for of course, he was very old, eighty-one, and besides
Mrs. Graham was very good to him. Still to-day she must not keep him
at home, for to stand once more within the rail offering the chalice
to his people had become a deep and blind desire, overmastering all
sense of weakness. Besides, there were other matters and grave ones to
be seen to, to-day. Somehow--he looked toward the eastward window--the
strength would come for the day, as it always came.
Slowly, while he stood looking out into the morning grown rosy now with
the coming sun, his head cleared more and more, as he thought about his
Westbury as it brightened beneath the Christmas sunrise. Few towns, the
Bishop thought, had changed so little in sixty years. He looked out on
the same Westbury he had first seen when he had come to St. John’s
college as a boy. Stately old River Street with its twin rows of elms
still curved to the curve of the river. Each quiet old house had in the
rear a terraced wintry garden sloping to the wide and sparkling water.
The Bishop knew each of these houses, even as far as Lucy Hollister’s,
which was beyond his sight. Lucy still kept the house of her girlhood
where the Bishop had first known her, known Lucy and her cousin, Annie.
Far beyond Lucy’s house, River Street changed to towering tenements and
grimed factories, the place of the strangers, where the Bishop often
walked, but wistful and puzzled, for it was this part of Westbury alone
that had changed since his boyhood, although even then it had been the
place of work-people, for whom St. John’s Southside Mission had been
founded. The Bishop stood thinking of the mission.
Well in sight, breaking the row of houses set among their wintry trees,
sprang the spire of St. John’s, and beyond its Rectory lay the brown,
cube-like buildings of the college above the sweeping river, a small
college of mighty men. It was there that the Bishop and his roommate,
Barty Judd, had learned to dream dreams. It was the glory of Westbury,
the kindly old city, remote, unworldly, that it had set so many young
men dreaming. The Bishop smiled to think how proudly Westbury still
pointed to its seven bishops, for the spirit of Westbury had not
changed in all the sixty years since the founding of the mission.
Westbury had given the Bishop, he thought, the most beautiful thing in
his life; it was this that brought the light to his face as he thought
of the gift he wished to give Westbury in return, to-day, if--if he
could! At that “if” his eyes deepened with a sharp and subtle change,
then cleared as the passing thought of the day before him yielded
to memories, and he saw the afternoon of the laying of the mission
corner-stone. As they had walked home together, the Bishop, after long
silence, had broken into boyish fire of words, seeing all his life
before him. Lucy had listened and answered, but Annie had been silent.
Dreamer as the boy had been, he had never dreamed of coming back one
day, long afterwards, and living to be an old, old man in the bishop’s
house in Westbury.
The sun was climbing to a golden blaze now, filling with hope the
day before the Bishop. He was always a good deal of a child in his
Christmas feeling. There was work before him on this Christmas day, in
his own house and out of it. Quite simply he closed his eyes a moment,
with bowed head, thinking of the Westbury he loved and of three within
it, whom he should see that day.
The Bishop’s tall figure swayed a little as he grasped the stair
rail, and for an instant his gaze was vague upon the dusky hall, upon
the gloomy wall-paper, the threadbare carpet. It was a gray and worn
old house in which the Bishop’s soul was harbored. A succession of
housekeepers, under the oversight of Mrs. Hollister, kept it in order,
but it needs the authority of kinship to change a wall-paper or a
carpet. Thus it was that the Bishop’s long hallway was hardly more his
own than the pavement outside, or his own dining-room door before which
he paused, hardly more his own than the doors along his familiar River
Street. His hand lingered on the knob, for, thinking of Mrs. Graham
within, and of the testing now of his three years’ hope, he had grown
apprehensive and wistful. Then his face flashed firm in a smile, as he
looked toward Someone beside him there in the dim hall. That little way
of looking toward the Friend with a quick upward smile was one of the
Bishop’s habits engendered by solitude. He never meant to betray his
thought publicly, yet sometimes wayfarers in the train, on the street,
were startled at the sudden passing of strange light across the gray
face, making it, as now in the opening doorway, the face of a little
child. The Bishop bent toward the black-clad little woman before him
the bow that belonged to the days of his youth. Age had stooped his
shoulders, but never stiffened their grace, nor that of the sweep of
his extended hand. His face--lean, clear-chiselled, blue-eyed, and
heavily thatched with white--was ashine with Christmas greeting.
“I wish you a beautiful Christmas!” he said.
Mrs. Graham’s glance met the Bishop’s furtively. She had restless brown
eyes beneath a tranquil parting of brown hair, curling and lightly
silvered. Her mouth looked as if locked upon discontent. She was a
stout, rosy little woman who moved in a heavy, bustling manner. She put
her hand into the Bishop’s awkwardly, never having become accustomed to
one who shook hands as a morning greeting.
“Merry Christmas,” she murmured perfunctorily, as, in the holiday
absence of a maid, she turned toward the business of the Bishop’s
breakfast. The raised slide of the dumb-waiter made a gap in the
solid paneling of dark cupboards occupying one wall. Like other
dining-rooms on River Street, the room had two long windows looking
toward the water. There was a wide piazza beyond them, hung with the
gnarly ropes of leafless Virginia creeper. It was a dark-wainscoted
room, but now the level eastern sun flooded it, and there was a great
crimson spot of roses at the Bishop’s plate. The table was set for
one, he noticed; when Maria was away, Mrs. Graham insisted on serving
him with her own hands, instead of settling comfortably into her usual
seat. In the silent room, only the sound of the dumb waiter that
creaked and rattled, but the Bishop was waiting to speak, after the
long patience of three years. When his breakfast had been set forth to
her satisfaction, Mrs. Graham sank upon the edge of a chair near the
window, keeping an alert eye on the Bishop’s needs, but having also an
air of absence.
“Well,” she burst out at last, “so it’s Christmas again!”
“Yes,” the Bishop smiled, “‘again.’ It comes around pretty often,
doesn’t it? This is your third Christmas in Westbury.”
“I wonder how many more I’ll have, in Westbury.”
“Is it such a bad place to spend Christmas in then, Westbury?”
“Bad for me, yes! After Fair Orchard!”
“But I had hoped you had begun to feel at home in Westbury.”
“Me! At home! In Westbury! No, I’ve no place here and never can have.
I see that plain enough,--just a housekeeper, anyway! I’ve no place
in the place, I mean, like at home! Oh, there’s no harm in Westbury!
It’s not as bad as some towns. There’s show here, but it’s not showy;
there’s money, but there’s manners, too! Only there’s no _heart_ in the
place! How could there be, with Dr. Newbold running the church and Mrs.
Hollister running society?”
“They both have hearts, I am sure, Mrs. Graham.”
“Maybe. Not for plain people, or poor people, though. Maybe for you.
Although Dr. Newbold--” she broke off sharply, teeth on lip, while her
eyes, too full and bright with meaning, changed before the Bishop’s
gaze, and she altered her unspoken sentence, concluding, “Dr. Newbold
suits the place all right. He don’t suit me, that’s all. It’s kind of
spoiled church for me, going to St. John’s, and church in Fair Orchard
was such a lot to me. It’s queer when you always hear about Westbury
being such a strong church place that it should have spoiled church
for me. It’s all right when you preach, of course, Bishop, but it’s
something else I’m talking about. It was different at home--oh,” her
rosy face darkened savagely, “sometimes it seems as if my church was
just another of the things she’s taken from me along with my home and
my boy!”
The Bishop closed his eyes an instant, seeking counsel.
“It’s Christmas that upsets me so! Christmas that brings it all back on
me so. And then to-day she sent, Florence herself, she sent the baby’s
picture on a post-card. It’s signed ‘From Florence.’ You’d think after
all that’s happened, she’d have let Dan send it, the first word I’ve
had from either of them for three years!”
She rose and filled the coffee cup abruptly. “Well,” she jerked the
words out, “Christmas and other days, I’ve got to grin and bear it,
being turned out by my son’s wife. But it’s been worse since there was
a baby.”
“It’s the baby’s first Christmas,” mused the Bishop.
“Yes, he’s seven months and sixteen days old.”
The Bishop smiled up at her, “May I see him? Where is the picture?”
She laid it before him. The Bishop adjusted his glasses, then removed
them to look from the picture to a keen scrutiny of the grandmother’s
face.
“Yes,” she answered his look. “You see it then? The baby looks like us,
like Dan and me. And I can see Dan’s father in him, too. There’s not a
hair of him that looks like the Reynoldses,--that lot!”
The Bishop was examining the photograph minutely. Mrs. Graham looked
over his shoulder, but at his next word she moved away again. “That’s
his mother’s hand holding him, isn’t it, that shadow under his arm?”
“Yes! His mother’s hand! He looks like us, but he don’t belong to us!
He’s hers!”
The Bishop glanced up, “And I suppose he’s also the other
grandmother’s.”
“No! Florence has no mother. I’m all the grandmother that baby’s got!”
“I think you never told me that before,” he paused thoughtfully, then
looking over to her standing by the window, he said, feeling slowly for
words, “So the baby’s mother, that girl out at Fair-Orchard, has had no
mother--to go with her--on that way--a woman goes, to bring home, a
little child?”
The Bishop’s voice was soft with the awe of many years ago. The
grandmother flushed, muttering, “She would not have wanted _me_. She
had Dan.”
The Bishop’s eyelids had fallen, quivering, over his eyes. He was far
away; again he watched with Annie, with Nan, as he said, “But men
cannot understand. God does not mean them to. Such things are a secret
between God and women, like the coming of Mary’s little child. Each
mother needs a mother then. It was not--it was not till then that I
understood how much my Nan had lost when she lost her mother.”
“It did not live, did it, at all, your daughter’s child?” whispered
Mrs. Graham.
The Bishop shook his head, not speaking, thinking of the little waxen
loveliness they had laid to sleep with Nan in the hollow of her
arm. His lips showed their rare palsied trembling, murmuring, “Both
together, Nan and the little one. She had been so well! I was not
prepared--” the eyelids of his quiet gray face trembled, then opened
on the blue eyes, as he said, “Of course, we know they do not die.
They are alive, somewhere where the dreams come true that we dream
for our children.” He smiled into her eyes, “For we are great old
dreamers, aren’t we, we grandparents?” He raised his hand from the
chair-arm, as if it would have pleaded, “But I think each mother needs
the grandmother to help her dream. I think she is wanting you now, that
Florence out there.”
She faced sharp about, “Florence! Want me!” She looked at him in grim
pity at his simplicity. “No, Bishop, Florence don’t want me! No more
than I want her! We’re misfits, Florence and me,--worse luck for Dan,
and for me, and for the baby, too, now!”
The blue eyes a-twinkle, “And worse luck for Florence, too,” he
persisted. “She sent you the picture. Wasn’t it perhaps to say that she
wants to show you the baby himself?”
“It’s like you to think that, Bishop, but it’s not like Florence to
mean that. I understand Florence! I can still see her face plain, that
last morning!”
“You have not seen her face since there was a baby. Perhaps she
understands you, too, now. Perhaps she understands, now, what it costs,
to give up an only child to anyone.”
“That’s it, of course, that’s what finished me up, her getting Dan, the
way she has. I guess I seem pretty mean to you, but Dan was all I had.”
“I think I understand,” the Bishop said quietly.
Arrested by his tone she turned, “Was he good, your daughter’s husband?
Did you get on with him?”
“No one is good enough for an only child. Yes, he was good. He--he has
been remarried for a long time, you know.” He spoke with long pauses,
remembering, “Yes, I got on with him. I should have lost my daughter if
I hadn’t. We had one happy year, together. Getting on is hard. But not
getting on is harder.”
She did not speak, turned from him again toward the window, intent,
musing.
“Isn’t it,” he pleaded, “harder?”
“You didn’t have to,” she spoke chokily, “get on with Florence! Maybe
you could, though, you, Bishop. But I couldn’t! You couldn’t maybe
understand how I can’t forgive her for all that she’s taken from me,--a
man couldn’t maybe understand, even you. It’s the mother working in
me. They used to laugh at me over home, and say I mothered all the
village. Yet now I can’t get at Dan, nor at the baby. I haven’t anyone
to mother, and it seems as if it makes me sort of,” she struck away a
tear with an awkward gesture, “sort of smothery!”
His eyes bent on her in sharp intentness, “There is someone for you to
mother!” he said.
“Who?”
“Florence!”
“Florence!” her voice hissed.
“Yes!”
Her trembling lips turned hard, “I guess I’d have to forgive her first!”
“Couldn’t you?” he questioned, while the blue eyes grew softly a-shine.
“Couldn’t you, to-day? Couldn’t you, for instance, go out to them to
spend Christmas, to-day?” His plan, long suppressed, came hurrying
forth. “It’s so near, and so easy! Only thirty miles to that baby!
The train leaves at ten, you have time. There’s another train back at
seven-two. And you needn’t mind about me. I shall be out all day, first
a visit I must make, then the service, and afterward I dine with Mrs.
Hollister. You are quite free, you see, to go!”
“I’m free enough, yes,” she admitted, “but I haven’t the will to go,
that’s all.”
“To the baby?”
“To Florence! It would mean making up with Florence!”
Lips and eyes showed a quick pleading smile as he said, “Isn’t that
perhaps what Christmas and babies are for, for making up?”
She was silent, her breast in its tightly hooked black rose and
fell. “But people!” she broke forth at length. “Everybody knowing!
The village knows I was turned out, and that there’s not been a word
between us for three years. I can’t go crawling back now, just because
there’s a baby come,--everybody looking on, everybody knowing!”
“It isn’t everybody’s baby. It’s yours, and hers,” then gravely, “I
was not thinking of other people. I was just thinking how much she
needs her mother, that girl!”
“Florence!” she said, and there were many thoughts in her tone, slow,
incredulous.
The Bishop’s eyes grew remote and bright, seeing Florence. He spoke
a little dreamily, “She needs you now, and she knows she needs you!
She may have been hard once, being young and without a mother. She
may have been cruel. It is different now. She does not feel so secure
now. They are so afraid for their babies, don’t you remember, always,
these little new mothers. There are so many dangers lying in wait for
the little men before they’ve got their armor on. There must be advice
to give, and care to give--oh, Florence knows how much he needs his
grandmother! Go and see. Can’t you? Couldn’t you? I--I’m in such a
hurry to have you go!”
“If I could only hold him once, Dan’s baby!”
“Florence’s baby, too,” he corrected gently.
The brief light swept from her face. Her plump comfortable hands were
knotted, and her round face drawn into dignity by pain. Her words were
grave and final, “The way to that baby is only through Florence, so I
can never go. I can never have him.”
Involuntarily the Bishop’s hand went to his temple in a gesture of
pain, then instantly was forced down. He hesitated, then at length,
“‘Never’ is such a long word,” he said. “Sometimes God says it for us,
but don’t--don’t let us ever say it for ourselves! You know,” a passing
tremor ran along his lips, “He didn’t let me have the grandchild
I hoped for, but don’t--don’t lose having yours. It seems as if I
couldn’t let you go on losing,--that. I am in such a hurry somehow
to-day. Can’t you go out there to-day, now? Take the baby the Christmas
present his mother most wants for him, take him his grandmother!”
She turned on him, intense, “Bishop, do you know what it’s like to make
up with a person who’s done you wrong? Do you know what it feels like
to forgive? A person who’d hurt you? Where you care most?”
A moment he groped in past experience for the answer, then in a rush of
realization it came upon him. He rose a little unsteadily, that he,
too, might stand to face her, as she stood by the curtained recess of
the window, where the searchlight of the Christmas sun fell relentless
on the drawn intensity of her plump face. The Bishop’s lean, corded
hands rested on the two ebony knobs of the chair back. He did not
notice, nor did she, that he swayed slightly with a passing dizziness.
“Yes,” he answered slowly, thinking of one he soon must see to-day, “I
know how it feels. Yes, I have had to learn, how to forgive--where I
cared most!”
“How did you make yourself do it? How?”
He would have evaded if he could. “I only know the old way,” he said
humbly, for the Bishop was shy in speaking of some things, as one is
shy in speaking about any friend in his presence.
“Tell me how!”
“I only know one way,” he repeated simply. “We all get at the truth
from different angles, so there may be many ways to learn to forgive,
but I can only tell you about the way that I have tried.” The Bishop
was so old that often, as now, his eyes showed the reflection of the
harbor-lights in view. As always in his sermons, he had now lost, in
his very consciousness of their needs, the presence of his audience in
the overwhelming Presence of which he forced himself to speak, “The
way I have found is to try always to see through His eyes. I think He
is always very near us, trying always to lift us to the level of His
eyes, so that we can look forth from that point of view. I think He is
always trying and trying to say things to us to excuse--the people who
have hurt us. If only we could clear our ears to hear Him! If only we
could stand at the level of His outlook into souls! Then we should see
so much that’s pitiable and excusable, so many handicaps and mistakes,
so much to make us sorry for them that we couldn’t help forgiving. He
always saw enough in every soul to make Him patient, and if we don’t
see enough to make us patient, too, we have to trust His vision and
insight, and forgive because He does.
“Yet it is hardest,” the Bishop’s face showed a passing shadow, as he
looked inward upon past struggles and forward to that next interview
of his Christmas Day, “to forgive those who hurt _Him_, His work. Yet
he forgave even that, upon His cross. When we remember that, I do
not know how I--how we--_dare_ not to forgive.” He paused, while his
fingers on the black knobs tightened, then the shadow of his face was
struck away by the quick sunshine of reassurance. He looked toward
Mrs. Graham, “You see,” he said, “it seems to me that if God in all
His eternity has no time to be stern, then perhaps we--who have such
a little while! have no time for anything but loving. Don’t you,” he
pleaded, “don’t you think so, too?”
The ruddiness had paled from her cheeks. She was looking at him with
wide, intense eyes.
“That’s your way, Bishop. But it’s what I couldn’t--ever climb up
to,--I guess.” She had to fight to speak, against her choking breath,
“I’m one of those you’ll have to forgive, I’m afraid, for not doing
what you want. I wish I could, on your account. But it don’t seem as if
I could make up with Florence. But I can’t bear that you should look
like that, Bishop,--disappointed! Don’t, please don’t, mind! It’s just
that I’m a mother who’s lost her boy, and wants him back and can’t get
him, him and his baby!”
“And yet,” he answered, “they are all there, all ready for you,
waiting, wanting you, all there! It is, it is, too bad!”
“Florence!” she whispered.
“Needing and wanting you most of all. Seeing, by the way her little one
needs her, how much she needs a mother. Perhaps mothering is your way
of forgiving. Couldn’t you try it? Florence has never had a chance, has
she, to learn many things, if she has been a motherless girl? Perhaps
she did hate you once. I don’t believe she hates anyone now. It’s very
hard to hate when there’s a baby in the house. She sent the picture.
She needs you. She knows she needs you, for she knows now what a child
can miss who has no mother. Let us think of all she has missed, and not
be too hard on her, you and I, any more.”
She was silent, one hand tense upon the curtain cord.
“It’s such a good day to go,” he urged, “such a good day to do the
unexpected, Christmas! Everyone expects the unexpected, on Christmas.”
A comical smile worked on her set face, “You do, anyway, Bishop!” she
said with a catch in the throat.
“I think I did allow myself to expect this,” he answered, “this
making-up. Perhaps I expected it because I wanted it so, for I’ve been
in such a hurry somehow, about that baby. Why, he’ll be growing up,
while we’re still talking. You have three-quarters of an hour,” he
glanced at the clock in quick remembrance of the visit to Dr. Newbold
before church-time, “and you’ll go?”
He waited.
She was silent still, until she burst out, “I can’t! I’d say ‘yes’ if
I could, when you beg me so. But I can’t say it, and I’ve got to be
honest with you. I can’t say it!”
Her face, working with sobs she forced down, was too painful to look
at, yet it gave no hope.
“I am very sorry,” he said quietly and turning went into the great
study adjoining, which faced, like the dining-room, on the veranda and
river. Suddenly very tired, he sank into his desk chair, pressing the
tips of his fingers to his temples, which had such a painful way of
throbbing every little while this morning.
“I did want it very much,” he acknowledged to himself, “very much.” He
sat thinking, for some moments, then remembering, rose and went into
the hall to put on his overcoat, whispering, “But it happened to Him
like this always--always!”
About to go out into the street, he turned back. The dining-room door
was shut. He opened it. Mrs. Graham was still standing in the window
recess, her forehead pressed to the cooling pane. There was no one
to see her face. Common-place, coarse, ugly with tears, lights were
trembling across it. “If she needs me,” she was whispering, “if she
needs me,--” for a holy thing was being born.
In the doorway, wearing his old cape overcoat, his face like a wistful
child’s beneath his silver hair, the Bishop waited.
“You will go?”
She did not hear, nor know. She did not move until she started at a
sound, the heavy closing of the outer door.