Yet the Bishop’s thought, in retrospect upon his Christmas Day, was strangely clear, as he looked out on that familiar picture, white stars above in the night-blue and, below, the blackness gemmed by ruddier earth-lights. So dark now, yet so bright with sun and hope in the Christmas morning! His thought went out to the unseen houses, each holding a little group of his friends, following them to the bend of the river until his fancy walked once more among the tenements where he knew the brown babies with their great black eyes, his friends, too.
Of late he had so often looked out on his little city wrapped in night, but not as now. Before, he had been thinking of his Christmas gift, the House of Friendship, which should, in the terms of some strange symbolism, give back to Westbury the beauty it had once given him. But this was not to be. He was quite clear about it all, and quiet. It was night now, and he had not done any of the things he had meant to do in the morning. He had not even gone to church. God’s chalice! He had not been able on this Christmas Day to offer it to one soul in all his Westbury!
All day long his hands had been baffled of their gift-giving. That was sometimes God’s way, the Bishop knew, as he leaned back in this strange, expectant peace. Suddenly, sharp as paintings torch-lit against a gloom, there passed before him again, as on the black street, those three faces out of his Christmas Day: Mrs. Graham’s, black hate scarcely lighted by love for that little Christmas baby; Newbold’s, storm-tossed upon a struggle that gave no presage of victory; and Lucy’s, seamed with the subtleties of a loneliness that could not see the only help for lonely living. These three faces were, God in his mystery had showed him to-day, only the symbols of his larger failure, in his town, in his diocese. His little garden space hedged in for him out of all the world, he had tended it with much love but with little wisdom. So God would have to take care of it now.
Sharp again, just as the three faces had flashed forth out of darkness and passed close against the Bishop’s eyes, came other visions and pictures, those of his Christ-child poem of the morning. Only now it was no sacred city of the Orient, but the dumb and sleeping streets of Westbury where the Child went wandering. As before, he knocked, all eager, and again opening doors flashed ruddy on the night, to close again with a low dull sound. On and on he fled, a glimmering baby-form blown on the winter wind, until the Bishop’s eyes closed wearily from following. He opened them with a twitch of pain, and there without, close against the dark sash the Child was standing, not sad at all, but sweet and smiling. Then instantly this picture, like the others, faded, and again the Bishop knew himself with the familiarity of unnumbered silent nights like this one, seated alone in his study, quiet with the peace of the Friend. Through all the solitary hours of all the solitary years, the Friend had always stood there, clear-figured, by the eastward window.
The night was wearing on as the Bishop sat, waiting. Very soon they would be there. He remembered that he had been looking for them all the day. It would be very cosy to have them coming in on Christmas night—his own!
But at the chiming of those two words through his brain, thought sharply asserted itself, keen and crystalline in retrospect. As a man brings all his life to God at the end, the Bishop looked into the Nazarene’s eyes from the picture of the little city that belonged to them both, whispering, “But those out there have been my own.”
Presently the silvered head sank back in the sudden drowsiness that falls upon the very old, but even as he yielded to it, the Bishop’s eyelids flickered an instant. He looked again toward the Friend, forever clear against the curtained window. He lifted his right hand a little, like a child, not knowing how confident it was. Too tired and sleepy to be conscious of anything at all but that Presence that filled all the room, the Bishop murmured happily, “And I have not been lonely!”
The Bishop did not actually doze off, however, but sat resting quietly in the peaceful borderland of sleep. The threadbare house that harbored him was very silent. From time to time, across his dim worn face, fancies flickered, bright as a caged bird’s dreaming. Out of the engulfing vagueness of his brain, Annie came to him, the child-woman of long ago. His boat was rocking at the little pier waiting, as she came tripping down the terraces. He saw the upward sweep of the round young arms as she opened the high wrought-iron gate. She wore a white muslin sprigged with yellow, wide-skirted and flounced. The live brown of her hair was swept back into a net. Her face was soft olive and rose, her lips parted, and the eyes grave and steady, a child’s. On either side about the high black portals of the gate pulsed and flamed wee yellow roses. Slim, sturdy boy that he was, something had shaken him in that moment like a tossed leaf. Even now, old and dim in his chair, it was not the sense of her lips beneath his sudden ones that he remembered; it was that there in that instant he saw her eyes change forever to a woman’s. And the boy, all a-quiver with strong youth as he was, he, too, in that moment had changed into a man, a man forever reverent before the mystery he had wakened. The Bishop’s hand tightened on the chair arm, for he remembered that at last, at last, Annie was coming back to him. He was waiting for her to come in.
Again thought shifted many a year; and he sat expectant of a knock, light, imperative, merry, Nan’s evening knock. The door swung in and she entered, that tall, slim girl of his. She wore a white dress girt about in the absurd panniers of the eighties. Her dark hair was looped low at her neck. She had her mother’s brooding brown eyes lightened by her father’s twinkle. She sank on a hassock at his knee, folding her long figure up in a trick of grace she had.
“Ready to hear a secret, father?”