Still he sat before her, silent and motionless as a portrait statue, as austere and beautiful. His face was in profile to her. The firelight fell on his silver-white hair and filled the eyes that did not turn or see her. Still she seemed to him changed into a stranger. But her words sounded in his head, “Sometimes you seem to see only God!” The Bishop put up his right hand to his brow, suddenly veiling his face from her. Against the strange recoil from her his quick prayer throbbed. So long Lucy gazed at that corded old hand that shut him from her that there grew at last on her face also, a marble sternness that matched his own. She was no longer beautiful beneath that blighting cynicism. Behind his lifted hand, the Bishop did not guess his testing, alone with God as he sat there, praying against this quivering repulsion of his soul. At last Lucy’s eyes turned from him to the fire. The smile of a faint scorn caught on her lips! Scorn for herself? Scorn for him? Sixty years of loving? Was this its issue?
Silence, except for the whispering fire.
The Bishop dropped his hand, leaning back a moment in uttermost relief. From head to foot, he felt, all quietly, some stern tension relaxed, and with it there passed away also something of that intensely clear vision he had just experienced. Looking now toward that other chair by the fire, he knew it was no stranger but the old familiar Lucy seated there, his friend, and how tired she looked and white and lonely! He must try to understand. It was very strange to realize it all, but step by step he must try to understand, even though he felt again now suddenly, and far more certainly, the shutting in upon him of the vagueness and dullness of the morning hours. He cried out to the Friend to hold it at bay a little while that he might talk to Lucy. He smiled over to her sunnily.
As she looked into his eyes that blighting scorn was transformed into a tremulous new beauty, her brooding face suddenly puckered with the painful tears of age.
“Henry, tell me how to live without you! Give it to me this Christmas Day, that gift of hope!”
“I would,” he answered slowly, “if I could! But I haven’t been so very successful in my gift-giving to-day. So I don’t feel very sure of myself. You’ll be patient, won’t you, while I try to understand?” Slowly and humbly he felt his way, with wistful pauses. “There is so much that is new to me, to understand.” Deep in thought he gazed into the past. “You have been very patient with me. I see now how often I have been self-absorbed and selfish, bringing it all to you, every worry. I have taken,—I see it now—much sympathy and given very little. It’s a little late, isn’t it, after sixty years, to ask you to excuse it?” He shook his head with a strange, sad little smile. “How I have talked to you! Always! It must indeed have seemed to you a long, long listening! I am sorry!”
“But I am not sorry, Henry!”
“No!” his face brightened. “For if I have been self-absorbed, you at least can remember that you have been very good to me. That helps, does it not?” he pleaded quickly. “That thought helps a little toward cheer? For as I try to understand, I do not seem able to look back and read my life without you. You have always strengthened me. You have never failed me.”
“Until to-day?”
Her whisper sent a shiver of hurt along his lips, but in a moment he achieved steadiness, holding self at bay. “That!” his breath caught, then low words that grew calm, “But as you said, it is perhaps my turn now, to listen to you. It is only fair, as you said, that I should listen and see, at last.”