It was so quiet in the old room, that low-lighted space, four-square, swung out upon the night. The Bishop’s long fingers passed slowly across his brow, trying to smooth away that darkness which seemed shutting in upon his brain.
“And might not effort new and different help you to forget, Lucy, that wall of death? Perhaps you might be so busy, so joyously busy, that you would come quite to the wall without seeing, and the gate would open so quickly that you would step through without waiting to be afraid. I wish God might let it be that way with you. Perhaps He will. Strange that for me death has always seemed easier than life, so that I’ve tried not to look at the thought of it too much, not because of fear, because of beauty. It is only lately that I have felt that God will not mind if I look toward the gate. I think perhaps he’ll excuse me now, for wanting to get home. They’ve been waiting for me pretty long, too, Annie and Nan and the baby. He must be a man now. I often wonder by what ways they grow up over there.
“Lucy, I wish you need not be afraid of going home.”
Again the Bishop passed his hand over his forehead. He felt himself growing vague, tried blindly to remember what he was trying to say, turned to her at length, appealing, with a strange little smile of apology.
“There is something I am trying to say, but somehow I keep losing it. Can you possibly excuse me if you try quite hard? For I know you’ve told me something this afternoon that I ought never to have forgotten, and somehow, Lucy, it’s gone, it fades, it escapes me! Only it was something that troubled you and that I was trying to understand. But I can’t, I can’t remember! But I wanted to say something to help a little, I remember that part of it. Lucy, for you and me, is that enough, even if I can’t remember what it was all about?
“There is just one thing I can find the words for, before they slip away,—you and I have had to walk through life alone, and yet we have walked together. It was because God walked with us that we have walked together. Lucy, you will remember, whatever happens, that He is always there? And so, that way, you see, we can never be so very far apart!”
They are piteous, the tears of age. Lucy pressed them back with ivory finger-tips on each eyelid, her hands masking all her face. Behind them stretched the long past, the brief future. The key to the future was in her broken whisper, “After all, God was just; Annie was fit to love you!”
But the Bishop had risen suddenly, and crossed the room blindly, stumbling but once. The crashing pain in his head left only one instinct—air, the street, his own house! Instantly he must get there! Then sharp through his own pain came admonishment. He steadied himself with one hand upon the mahogany table where the green lamp stood. It was the close of his Christmas, he remembered; would it go with no reassurance?
The white panelled doorway behind him, he stood there by the low green lamp. His face was all longing, like a little child’s.
“Lucy, I tried; have I given you—hope?”