“So many Christmases!” he murmured.
“I neither own to them,” she answered, “nor yet, not own!”
Despite her many Christmases, it was with only a slight stiffening of the sinuous grace of her girlhood that Lucy moved at the Bishop’s side, to the dining-room, to the mid-afternoon holiday dinner of Westbury habit. Lucy kept every custom Westbury had had in her youth, and she made other people keep such custom, too; slight, elusive, dominant, as she was, in her great house by Westbury’s river. They passed from stately course to course exactly as they had done on that Christmas when Henry Collinton and his wife had dined with Lucy when Annie was a bride, and still earlier, the Bishop could remember dining at that table, when he was a college lad and the two cousins, girls, Annie the dark one, and Lucy, elfin and amber-tinted. The room was the same, the china and the silver the same. Beyond the two long windows ran the gray loop of the river. Many a time long ago, they had floated all three in a boat on that spangled river. The wall paper was the same, put on by French hands many a year ago. Round and round it raced a French sporting scene, trim-waisted gentlemen that rode to the hunt by wood and stream, and ladies that joined them for the huntsman’s repast, gay picnickers all, still vivid in color.
It was all the same, for in Westbury things did continue blessedly unchanged. Lucy was unchanged, for all the long wearing of her widow’s black. The yellow still showed in the snowy gloss of her carefully arranged hair. Age had slightly rimmed her eyes with red, but the will-o’-the-wisp still danced in them. Her mouth, netted by wrinkles, was hardly more finely whimsical than in girlhood. As of old, when in earnest talk, she dropped her chin, still clearly chiseled, to a delicate white claw of a hand, flashing from a fall of black chiffon. Lucy treated age as she did people: like them, age could not tell whether it had penetrated her delicate aloofness.
To the Bishop, room and river and woman were still the same. Spent to the uttermost as he knew himself to be to-day, Lucy’s indomitable vitality quickened him with sharp hope; perhaps, after all, there was much he could still leave to Lucy! But not yet for him the outpouring, as ever, into Lucy’s ear. That would come, but not yet! How happy, now, shut in by that race round and round the walls of those merry picnickers, to pluck, as it were a Christmas gift from a tree, one hour in which they should still be boy and girl together.
As they talked, two faces looked over their shoulders; over the Bishop’s a boy’s with brown hair flung back, with eager listening eyes, and a mouth that spoke poetry and as instantly laughed out in merry mockery of it, a face that, clear as water, was all the play of a mobile brain; and close by Lucy’s head, another in a white bonnet, green-ribboned and green-leaved, from which, framed in red-gold curls, looked out a tinted cameo face, with green-blue eyes, mocking and mysterious. To-day, Lucy’s body was still fragile and unbroken, as in girlhood, and for all she had married and borne four children, her soul still went unfettered as when she was a girl. But age had charred the Bishop’s face to fine white ashes, in which the blue eyes burned, luminous and inward.
“Henry,” mused Lucy, “the poetry never came back to you, did it? Do you ever write nowadays, ever snare a little wild, singing poem now?”
“The verses come to me sometimes still, but not near enough to catch, or to wish to catch, perhaps. I do sometimes see the pictures still, this very morning, for instance, and I hear rhythms; but, no, I have never written since—since Nan went.”
He was silent a moment, lips tightening, then lights began to gleam on his face, with the familiar pleasure of thinking aloud to Lucy. “But perhaps I do not write because I can no longer distinguish between poetry and prose, in life. That is boy’s work, really, to see the sharp outlines of things that afterwards, for us, seem to overlap, to interweave. Poetry and prose, which is which? Just so the distinction between the sacred and the secular, easy enough at twenty, not at eighty: then the two were clear to me as bars of sun and shadow on a pavement; now the sun-bars would seem all softened with shadow, and the shadow all shot through with sun. Just so the distinction between the divine and the human, God and man, where shall one separate the two? Can anyone say. Just so far,—” here the Bishop, all eager explanation, drew the figure of a cross upon the leather armchair, keeping an ivory finger tip upon the spot, “just so far shall God stoop to man, just so far man rise to God! Oh! no, no!” He erased the imaginary cross with a quick brushing of his long hand, “life is not like that, not sharp distinctions, it is all interwoven, interwoven!
“So with poetry and prose. How can I possibly write,” he laughed, “if I can’t tell them apart? Why, nowadays I seem to get meshed in my own metres. No, I’m no true poet,” he shook his head ruefully, “if I can’t tell whether a poem is inside of me or outside of me, whether I am it, or it is I! No, old age is the time for seeing, not for singing.” He paused, thinking, “But I verily believe I like the seeing better than the singing.” He looked over to her in the old, quick boyish way, “Don’t you?”