XXXI
ADVENT EVE
The bishop arrived on the Saturday afternoon. He was still the same little old man, with the side-whiskers and the long mouth, the queer voice and the ungainly limp; and Robert Carlton found him neither more nor less cordial than at their last dread interview; but he asked to see the church before it was too dark.
All was in readiness at last. But the cocoanut matting in the aisle and transepts, and the maroon axminster in the chancel, had only been laid that day. As yet there was no stained glass, and only the east window and the west were mullioned as of old; but through the latter a wintry sun poured thick red beams, already too much aslant to touch the floor, but just falling upon the altar with its glimmering candlesticks, its rich green cover, its violet frontal, all three gifts from the hall. The bishop heard this without remark, his mouth a mere seam. But he approved of the rows of rush-seated chairs in place of pews, and he admired the simple pulpit of pitch pine. There was a pleasant smell of pitch pine in the church. All the woodwork was of this wood, including the ceiling and all panelling; and the pores of the fragrant timber were not stopped up with varnish. The new red hassocks looked very bright under each chair, and the new black prayer-books shone like polished jet on the book-rests behind them. In the south transept, a space was boarded off for the new organ; and here chaos had still a corner to itself; nor was either the lighting or the heating apparatus quite complete. Oil-stoves were already burning, however, at various points, and their odour compared unfavourably with that of the pitch pine.
"I do not want you to catch cold to-morrow," said Carlton, as he locked the door behind them when they left.
"Tut!" said the bishop, "I am not such an old man that you need coddle me."
Nor did he look a day older for all these years, as they went out together into the raw red sunset. But Robert Carlton seemed almost to have caught him up: he had come back from London so haggard and hollow-eyed.
They talked very little until the evening. Carlton had servants now, that very widow who had been the first to desert him being head and chief once more; and she signalised the occasion by serving one of the soundest meals of her career. But it was in the long low study, now a study pure and simple, and an infinitely tidier one than aforetime, that the bishop smoked his after-dinner pipe like any deacon, while Carlton also tasted his first tobacco for five years and a half. And still they were strangely silent, until the occurrence of an incident, little in itself, but great with suggestion.
There was a tiny patter on the worn carpet, and all at once the bishop beheld a big brown mouse seated upright within a few inches of his companion's boot. The bishop exclaimed, and the mouse fled with a scuttle and a squeak.
"I tamed him," Carlton explained with a slight access of colour. "The house is overrun with them, but this fellow lets none of the others in here."