They seemed to sit there as if looking on these words, in a silence that grew palpitant. Then her cry broke, “Henry, I can be all that you have believed, I can promise to try to do all that you desire. If you ask me to do it for you! Do you?”
All in that strange daylight within his brain, the Bishop saw the future, saw his work die with him. In the same white light he saw the woman before him whom he had never known.
Lucy waited. God’s or hers? Yet why had she loved him except because he had never been hers? The Bishop’s gaze rested upon her in a far tranquillity of insight.
“No.”
He sat there, quiet as a portrait before her gaze, and all alone. She had desired to rouse him from bodily weakness, and there was about him now no taint of feebleness. He sat erect, his long hands tranquil but not flaccid. A smile touched his lips, so fine and firm, a man’s smile, not a child’s; a smile of thought in retrospect, neither bright nor bitter. He had believed his lonely life cheered by a beautiful friendship, so sacred that he had supposed it hallowed the shrines of his God, of his wife, even as he did. This friendship had not been what he thought it. Truth was well. He had no friend. There remained God.
“Henry!”
He looked over to her with a far, alien pity.
“Have I lost you, Henry? I was never mad before. To keep you I have been for a lifetime so frightfully wise! Have I lost you now?”
Involuntarily he shut his eyes, the faintest line was pencilled between his brows. Pain struck home again through all that serenity of light. If there was one thing Henry Collinton, the man, loved, it was reserve, the delicate stateliness of their mutual sympathy. Yet here was the nakedness of a woman’s soul! Words seemed to him too far away to find or utter.
“Henry, sometimes you seem to me to see only God!”