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Page 12
There were bridesmaids and ushers staying at the Fieldings'. The
graceful girl who poured out the Bishop's tea on the piazza, some hours
later, and brought it to him with her own hands, stared a little at his
face for a moment.
"You look tired, Bishop. Is it hard work marrying people? But you must
be used to it after all these years," and her blue eyes fell gently on
his gray hair. "So many love-stories you have finished--so many, many!"
she went on, and then quite softly, "and yet never to have a love-story
of your own!"
At this instant Eleanor, lolling on the arm of his chair, slipped over
on his knee and burrowed against his coat a big pink bow that tied her
hair. The Bishop's arm tightened around the warm, alive lump of white
muslin, and he lifted his face, where lines showed plainly to-day, with
a smile like sunshine.
"You are wrong, my daughter. They never finish--they only begin here.
And my love-story"--he hesitated and his big fingers spread over the
child's head, "It is all written in Eleanor's eyes."
"I hope when mine comes I shall have the luck to hear anything half as
pretty as that. I envy Eleanor," said the graceful bridesmaid as she
took the tea-cup again, but the Bishop did not hear her.
[Illustration: "Many waters shall not wash out this love," said Eleanor]
He had turned toward the sea and his eyes wandered out across the
geraniums where the shadow of a sun-filled cloud lay over uncounted
acres of unhurried waves. His face was against the little girl's bright
head, and he said something softly to himself, and the child turned her
face quickly and smiled at him and repeated the words:
"Many waters shall not wash out love," said Eleanor.
THE WITNESSES
The old clergyman sighed and closed the volume of "Browne on The
Thirty-nine Articles," and pushed it from him on the table. He could not
tell what the words meant; he could not keep his mind tense enough to
follow an argument of three sentences. It must be that he was very
tired. He looked into the fire, which was burning badly, and about the
bare, little, dusty study, and realized suddenly that he was tired all
the way through, body and soul. And swiftly, by way of the leak which
that admission made in the sea-wall of his courage, rushed in an ocean
of depression. It had been a hard, bad day. Two people had given up
their pews in the little church which needed so urgently every ounce of
support that held it. And the junior warden, the one rich man of the
parish, had come in before service in the afternoon to complain of the
music. If that knife-edged soprano did not go, he said, he was afraid he
should have to go himself; it was impossible to have his nerves scraped
to the raw every Sunday.
The old clergyman knew very little about music, but he remembered that
his ear had been uncomfortably jarred by sounds from the choir, and that
he had turned once and looked at them, and wondered if some one had made
a mistake, and who it was. It must be, then, that dear Miss Barlow, who
had sung so faithfully in St. John's for twenty-five years, was perhaps
growing old. But how could he tell her so; how could he deal such a blow
to her kind heart, her simple pride and interest in her work? He was
growing old, too.
His sensitive mouth carved downward as he stared into the smoldering
fire, and let himself, for this one time out of many times he had
resisted, face the facts. It was not Miss Barlow and the poor music; it
was not that the church was badly heated, as one of the ex-pewholders
had said, nor that it was badly situated, as another had claimed; it was
something of deeper, wider significance, a broken foundation, that made
the ugly, widening crack all through the height of the tower. It was
his own inefficiency. The church was going steadily down, and he was
powerless to lift it. His old enthusiasm, devotion, confidence--what had
become of them? They seemed to have slipped by slow degrees, through the
unsuccessful years, out of his soul, and in their place was a dull
distrust of himself; almost--God forgive him--distrust in God's
kindness. He had worked with his might all the years of his life, and
what he had to show for it was a poor, lukewarm parish, a diminished
congregation, debt--to put it in one dreadful word, failure!
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