Their eyes met long. Then the tense pause slackened. Murray Newbold knew best his feeling for the Bishop when he felt the child gazing from the faded eyes and speaking in his pleading voice.
“Murray, will you build, then, the House of Friendship, for Westbury?”
Silence. Newbold had bowed his forehead upon his interlaced fingers. His face was concealed except the strong jaw, and the lips, motionless, curiously refined by their tight pressure. Moments went by. Within closed eyelids Newbold saw his future. He saw the past as if the issues between himself and the Bishop had been always mounting to this final issue. He saw himself, objective, detached as a painting. So taut were all his senses on this morning that it seemed to him that he should always see the Bishop’s face looking upon him just as he had closed his eyes against it, there across the desk. It was a moment of such intense seeing as makes promises impossible. The minutes went, one after one. He could not have spoken a word.
A touch brushed Newbold’s shoulder, “I am going now, lad,” the Bishop said. Sudden and clamorous, the noon-day chimes, at the close of the service, rang out, as the study door closed.
PART III
The air of the blue Christmas noon was sparkling clear, yet the Bishop’s steps were groping. His blue eyes were vague as he smiled in response to motor cars that flashed by, or carriages that passed with a brisk jingle of harness. Groups, lightly laughing in the Christmas sun, brushed by the old familiar figure in the cape overcoat, but they seemed strangers. In the sharp daylight after that dusky study, the Bishop trod an unknown street, as wistful and alone as a lost child. Was this his Westbury, where none of this gay Christmas throng gave thought to those swarming tenements at the bending of the river? An old man’s life, what was it, against this hard and happy current? A smile, briefly bitter, darkened the Bishop’s face; he was old and would pass, having given his Westbury nothing!
Yet all the time his feet, making for reassurance and relief, were bearing him toward Lucy Hollister’s welcome, with the homing instinct of a child that knows one door its own. Across the Bishop’s weariness flashed the thought that in the afternoon Lucy would let him lie down for a while.
Lucy’s door opened wide to the Bishop. He felt once again, as the closed latch shut him in from that vague and puzzling street, the spell of the wide hall that cleft the house, and of grave old walls showing at the opposite end a picture of the river through broad glass. The Bishop handed his coat and hat to the brown old footman, his friend of many years, then his head cleared happily at the sound of a soft rustle and the tapping of light decisive slippers. Lucy’s hand was in his.
“Good Christmas, Henry,” she said crisply, and led him in to the drawing-room fire.
“I was worried,” she went on. “You were not at church, nor at the house when I drove there afterward.”