“What sort of a bishop am I?” his Reverence went on, in a faint voice. “I ought to have been a village priest, or a deacon, or a plain monk. All this is choking me—it is choking me——”
“What’s that? Oh, Lord God Almighty! There—go to sleep now, your Reverence. What do you mean? What’s all this you are saying? Good night!”
All night long the bishop lay awake, and in the morning he grew very ill. The lay brother took fright and ran first to the archimandrite, and then for the monastery doctor who lived in the city. The doctor, a stout, elderly man, with a long, grey beard, looked intently at his Reverence, shook his head, knit his brows, and finally said:
“I’ll tell you what, your Reverence; you have typhoid.”
The bishop grew very thin and pale in the next hour, his eyes grew larger, his face became covered with wrinkles, and he looked quite small and old. He felt as if he were the thinnest, weakest, puniest man in the whole world, and as if everything that had occurred before this had been left far, far behind, and would never happen again.
“How glad I am of that!” he thought. “Oh, how glad!”
His aged mother came into the room. When she saw his wrinkled face and his great eyes, she was seized with fear, and, falling down on her knees by his bedside, she began kissing his face, his shoulders, and his hands. He seemed to her to be the thinnest, weakest, puniest man in the world, and she forgot that he was a bishop, and kissed him as if he had been a little child whom she dearly, dearly loved.
“Little Paul, my dearie!” she cried. “My little son, why do you look like this? Little Paul, oh, answer me!”
Kitty, pale and severe, stood near them, and could not understand what was the matter with her uncle, and why granny wore such a look of suffering on her face, and spoke such heartrending words. And he, he was speechless, and knew nothing of what was going on around him. He was dreaming that he was an ordinary man once more, striding swiftly and merrily through the open country, a staff in his hand, bathed in sunshine, with the wide sky above him, as free as a bird to go wherever his fancy led him.
“My little son! My little Paul! Answer me!” begged his mother.