"Oh, my son, my son!" he cried again, "how have you shortened my days! How have you clothed me with shame! Oh, my son, my son!"
But love was uppermost even in that bitter hour, and the good God sent the stricken man the gift of tears. "He is dead, he is dead!" he cried; "now is my heart smitten and withered like grass. Ewan is dead. My son is dead. Can it be true? Yes, dead, and worse than dead. Lord, Lord, now let me eat ashes for bread and mingle my drink with weeping."
And so he poured out his broken spirit in a torrent of wild laments. The disgrace that had bent his head heretofore was but a dream to this deadly reality. "Oh, my son, my son! Would God I had died before I saw this day!"
The people stood by while the unassuageable grief shook the Bishop to the soul. Then one of them—it was Thormod Mylechreest, the bastard son of the rich man who had left his offspring to public charity—took the old man by the hand, and the crowd parted for them. Together they passed out of the churchyard, and out of the hard glare of the torchlight, and set off for Bishop's Court. It was a pitiful thing to see. How the old father, stricken into age by sorrow rather than years, tottered feebly on the way. How low his white head was bent, as if the darkness itself had eyes to peer into his darkened soul.
And yet more pitiful was it to see how the old man's broken spirit, reft of its great bulwark, which lay beneath it like an idol that was broken, did yet struggle with a vain effort to glean comfort from its fallen faith. But every stray text that rose to his heart seemed to wound it afresh. "As arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are children of the youth.... They shall not be ashamed.... Oh, Absalom, my son, my son!... For thy sake I have borne reproach; shame hath covered my face.... I am poor and needy; make haste unto me, O God.... Hide not thy face from thy servant, for I am in trouble.... O God, thou knowest my foolishness.... And Eli said, It is the Lord, let him do as seemeth him good.... The waters have overwhelmed me, the streams have gone over my soul; the proud waters have gone over my soul."
Thus tottering feebly at the side of Mylechreest and leaning on his arm, the Bishop went his way, and thus the poor dead soul of the man, whose faith was gone, poured forth its barren grief. The way was long, but they reached Bishop's Court at last, and at sight of it a sudden change seemed to come over the Bishop. He stopped and turned to Mylechreest, and said, with a strange resignation:
"I will be quiet. Ewan is dead, and Dan is dead. Surely I shall quiet myself as a child that is weaned of its mother. Yes, my soul is even as a weaned child."
And with the simple calmness of a little child he held out his hand to Mylechreest to bid him farewell, and when Mylechreest, with swimming eyes and a throat too full for speech, bent over the old man's hand and put his lips to it, the Bishop placed the other hand on his head, as if he had asked for a blessing, and blessed him.
"Good-night, my son," he said simply, but Mylechreest could answer nothing.
The Bishop was turning into his house when the memory that had gone from him for one instant of blessed respite returned, and his sorrow bled afresh, and he cried piteously. The inanimate old place was in a moment full of spectres. For that night Bishop's Court had gone back ten full years, and if it was not now musical with children's voices, the spirit of one happy boy still lived in it.