“The empty chair has already invited you, Lady.” He waited.
She seated herself, but had lost her air of insolence and no longer baited her dark eyes with a flicker of dare to a man’s guess of her past. Into them had come the terrible pleading of a dumb brute for respite from unseen foe.
“What can I do for you, Lady?” asked the young Bishop.
Into her face came the wan wistful smile of a gambler’s last cast of the dice. Her glance fell. She leaned forward across the table.
“I am not mad. Do not think me mad. You ask what can you do for me? I have both heard and seen your miracles from faith. Years ago, when I was a widow in Iconium, I saw your leader, Paul, work such miracles, but when I sent a magician out to bribe him to tell the secret of his tricks, I could learn nothing. Then he bewitched my only daughter, and she deserted her affianced husband, and joined the Christian sect and has kept house for what she calls her holy women in the hills on the Roman Road for over twenty years. I am an old woman, but she is”—the woman stammered—“she is eternally young. She wears a youth and radiance that grow with growing years, while I—I flee a skeleton called age that clutches me as I run; but she sits quiet while the death’s head of age slips past, leaving her all untouched. You ask me what can you do for me? I prayed all night in Diana’s Temple. I offered incense enough to redeem ten slaves. I am not mad. Do not think me mad. I would pay any price. Here is the gold. I gave a ragged beggar child gold enough to make his parents rich, but to be told which way you lived. I would buy from you your secret of eternal youth. How do you cheat age and death? Why are you happier as you grow older?”
The astounded Bishop fell back with a gasp. It was as if a dark shadow made of self in withered flesh had cast itself athwart the translucent gladness of the spring morning, and would hold the rainbow in its dead and greedy hands.
“Are you the Mother who cast her daughter out to the dogs of the midnight streets in Iconium years ago, because she would not marry the man to whom you sold her? Are you the Mother of Thecla, whom Paul converted?” he demanded.
The woman did not answer. She cowered like a dumb brute from a blow.
“God’s mercy is long enough to reach down and pardon the meanest,” he went on. “God wills not that anything He has created should perish, but even now, you think only of self; and self is the demon that locks you in your dungeon. When I saw you fling the beggar child down the stone steps and then relent and throw the coins after him, I thought it was repentance of your own hard heart; but now I know ’twas but another offering made to the god of self to find another temple where your prayer might be answered when you had failed with Diana. Even now, you think not of the fate that your cruelty brought on your daughter! You think only of saving yourself from skeleton age and death! Self is the vampire that sucks life and youth and radiance to dry shell. Cast self out and let the waters of life in. When you have pondered that, come back for admission to the Kingdom of Gladness; and your own daughter Thecla can open the door and give you the secret.”
He strode from the cloister in the towering rage of a man who has seen a daughter thrown to the wild beasts by the selfishness of a mother. The woman’s body rocked with paroxysm of self-pity in the stone chair of the cloister.