“There is blest living here—loving and serving,
And quest of truth, and serene friendships dear;
But stay not, Spirit! Earth has one destroyer,—His
name is Death—flee, lest he find thee here.”
And what if then, while the still morning brightened,
And freshened in the elm the Summer’s breath,
Should gravely smile on me the gentle angel,
And take my hand, and say: “My name is Death.”
Sill’s verses occurred to the bishop as he lay awake in the night. A thing had startled him during the day, and sleep had not come promptly as ordinarily. He listened, aware of each shading of sound, to the pleasant, dim noises of the midnight world. A thin wind rustled the trees outside his windows, it might be as if a crowd of light-footed ladies in silk petticoats passed unendingly by; far off in the road hoof-beats approached rapidly and rapidly died away; a dog—little Café, for he knew his voice—sent a shower of light, futile barks after the distant horse; a shutter somewhere banged aimlessly at intervals. Each accustomed impression, unnoted on common nights, reached his brain as a revelation, because of that which Everingham, the village doctor, had said in the afternoon.
So he lay awake and thought about the new prospect. It excited him as the prospect of a trip to Europe might excite him. However, Everingham was not certain; he had asked for a consultation, and the bishop had telegraphed Jim Fletcher, as he had called him since the two had roomed together at college fifty years back, to come down when it was possible. And Jim—Doctor James Austin Fletcher, as he was known over all America—Jim, to the bishop, had answered that he would be in Lancaster to-morrow at eleven. Jim would settle it. Meantime, what was the use of staying awake? The fact seemed to verge on emotionalism. He had believed himself free of that. He had believed himself free, moreover, of a thought which had once poisoned his days—free, but here it was following him, and in his veins throbbed the old uneasiness, familiar yet for all the years between. “It’s not my affair now,” he spoke aloud, as if reasoning, and then words came to him which he knew well, and he said them and peace came with them. He turned toward the square of the window where the opal night poured in and lay on his forehead and filtered to his nerves; with that the rhythm of Sill’s verses caught and rocked him as his mother would have rocked him seventy years before, and he went quietly to sleep.