“You wonder why I speak these things to-day? It is your own fault, Henry, my friend! Why do I keep my hearth fire bright except that you should drop in beside it and talk to me? It is quite the only thing left that is entertaining. And to-day you yourself threaten that!” Her voice fell low, “Christmas has always been my day, why this time do you bring with you these terrible thoughts, this talk of—death! Why talk of it, the thinking of it is bad enough! Did anyone ever hear me talk of dying? Except, of course, my lawyer. No, when death takes me, he must catch me first! I shall never go forth to meet him with plans and preparations for the things that shall come after,—and why should you? Why must you talk of your going, speaking as if I could have an interest in your work without you! Oh, Henry, why did you yourself bring the spectre to our Christmas fire, where I wanted to be snug and warm! You are not afraid, but I—I regret to confess it, I am!” Then her tone grew less intense, determinedly casual, “Yet it is curious that I should care or really take the trouble to be afraid! I who am bored to the uttermost! The other will be at least a new thing! But I have never been fond of games of chance! A picture in a frame is dead enough, but a coffin is—ugh!—slightly worse! It is so ugly, this dying! Nobody can ever say I yielded to it before I had to—I have yielded so far, I flatter myself, to nothing! Yet when I must, I shall step into my carriage and drive off with my head up and my lips shut, like a lady! As I have lived!”
She paused, momentarily conscious of his expression, so that to the strange intentness of his watching face she went on, “I never have yielded to the need of a confessional before; if I do so once in a lifetime, you really must excuse me, Henry!
“Of course, for you it is different, you are not afraid; you are a man, and then you have your religion. But a woman is rarely religious, at least a woman who has not had what she wanted! As a thinking person, I quite envy you your religion. It is a valuable possession, at this end of life. Not that I am unorthodox—who is, in our good old churchly Westbury? I am a good churchwoman,—that does not enable me to see through a stone wall. Oh, Henry, Henry, here you come to-day, looking so pale that I can’t bear it, and talking of going, passing on, leaving your work! You have made me feel how near we are, you and I, to that stone wall. I am sitting here shivering at the strange things on the other side!”
No light but the ebbing fire and the clear green lamp, and somewhere outside in the darkness stars above the swift rush of the river.
“It is this that makes me talk. The time is so short, here, and over there—who knows about over there? One speaks out at last, I find, after being good for sixty years. For I have been good, have I not, Henry, for sixty years,—listened and listened, helped, as you believe, your work? It has been a great thing to be jealous of so great a work! Did you really think my mind was in it, that I really cared,—I!—for missions, for making men over, for turning a town right about face!
“I never expected to speak out; pictures in frames do not expect to speak out. Yet I might have known, for sooner or later everyone does speak out to you. I’ve been rather proud of being the one exception. But is it not my turn? And yours to listen, to me, just once, at last? You are surprised, I suppose. I am afraid I do not care that you are. I had to open your eyes. You speak as if I existed only to carry on your work—it has always been like that. So I’ve drawn you a portrait. Do you still think, looking at it, that I am the one to give you hope, I! What do you think, Henry Collinton, of the portrait of Lucy Dwight?”
Her strangely gleaming eyes at last met the Bishop’s deep gaze, profound, unfaltering. There was stillness, then the Bishop spoke, in quiet judgment on himself, “My work? Yet I had hoped that it seemed God’s. And for sixty years I have thought that you loved it!”
“I have loved you!”
There was no old age for them now, no past, no future. Beyond the room that briefly held them were night and the river and death. She was Lucy Dwight of the flickering fire flame, who laid bare at the last her deathless desire. The man she loved was God’s, was all men’s. After a lifetime of delicate sanity, she cried out to him to be for one hour hers. Then she waited.
The singular clarity of the Bishop’s brain had annulled for him every other emotion. He no longer felt any shock of revelation. The lucidity of his thinking was like a physical sensation of actual daylight in the room and beyond the windows. He saw the past as if it had been written in a foreign tongue and with a new meaning, but he saw it as plainly as black print on white paper. The woman before him was one whom he had never known, but he read her soul, too, clear as a printed page. So strangely clear his head, it seemed to him he could have laid his hand on that wall of death Lucy had talked of, that it would have crumbled at his touch, leaving him standing on the other side, in this same new daylight, serene and unsurprised. So crystal his thoughts that words seemed to him a remote and frivolous medium, like a grown man’s being forced to rediscover his baby-lisp in order to make himself understood. His personal pain had become merely a matter for reflection and limpid analysis. Carried far on thought that ran deep and wide, the Bishop spoke, hardly conscious of his words, “But love loves! It does not hurt! You knew me and my faith in you and my hope through you. If you had loved me, would you have destroyed for me that faith and hope? Would you not have taken from my hand my boy and my town, to take care of and to help, if you had loved me?”