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Page 8
"You're a churchman; you live behind a wall, you hear voices through it,
but you can't be in the fight--it's easy for you."
"Life isn't easy for anyone, Dick," said the Bishop, slowly. "You know
that. I'm fighting the current as well as you. You are a churchman as
well as I. If it's my _m�tier_ to preach against human passion, it's
yours to resist it. You're letting this man you hate mould your
character; you're letting him burn the kindness out of your soul. He's
making you bitter and hard and unjust--and you're letting him. I thought
you had more will--more poise. It isn't your affair what he is, even
what he does, Dick--it's your affair to keep your own judgment unwarped,
your own heart gentle, your own soul untainted by the poison of hatred.
We are both churchmen, as you put it--loyalty is for us both. You live
your sermon--I say mine. I have said it. Now live yours. Put this
wormwood away from you. Forgive Preston, as you need forgiveness at
higher hands. Don't break the girl's heart, and spoil your boy's
life--it may spoil it--the leaven of bitterness works long. You're at a
parting of the ways--take the right turn. Do good and not evil with your
strength; all the rest is nothing. After all the years there is just one
thing that counts, and that our mothers told us when we were little
chaps together--be good, Dick."
The magnetic voice, that had swayed thousands, the indescribable trick
of inflection that caught the heart-strings, the pure, high personality
that shone through look and tone, had never, in all his brilliant
career, been more full of power than for this audience of one. Fielding
got up, trembling, and stood before him.
"Jim," he said, "whatever else is so, you are that--you are a good man.
The trouble is you want me to be as good as you are; and I can't. If you
had had temptations like mine, trials like mine, I might try to follow
you--I would try. But you haven't--you're an impossible model for me.
You want me to be an angel of light, and I'm only--a man." He turned
and went into the house.
The oldest inhabitant had not seen a devotion like the Bishop's and
Eleanor's. There was in it no condescension on one side, no strain on
the other. The soul that through fulness of life and sorrow and
happiness and effort had reached at last a child's peace met as its like
the little child's soul, that had known neither life nor sorrow nor
conscious happiness, and was without effort as a lily of the field. It
may be that the wisdom of babyhood and the wisdom of age will look very
alike to us when we have the wisdom of eternity. And as all the colors
of the spectrum make sunlight, so all his splendid powers that patient
years had made perfect shone through the Bishop's character in the white
light of simplicity. No one knew what they talked about, the child and
the man, on the long walks that they took together almost every day,
except from Eleanor's conversation after. Transmigration, done into the
vernacular, and applied with startling directness, was evidently a
fascinating subject from the first. She brought back as well a vivid
and epigrammatic version of the nebular hypothesis.
"Did you hear 'bout what the world did?" she demanded, casually, at the
lunch-table. "We were all hot, nasty steam, just like a tea-kettle, and
we cooled off into water, sailin' around so much, and then we got crusts
on us, bless de Lawd, and then, sir, we kept on gettin' solid, and
circus animals grewed all over us, and then they died, and thank God for
that, and Adam and Evenin' camed, and Madge _can't_ I have some more
gingerbread? I'd just as soon be a little sick if you'll let me have
it."
The "fairyland of science and the long results of time," passing from
the Bishop's hands into the child's, were turned into such graphic
tales, for Eleanor, with all her airy charm, struck straight from the
shoulder. Never was there a sense of superiority on the Bishop's side,
or of being lectured on Eleanor's.
"Why do you like to walk with the Bishop?" Mrs. Vail asked, curiously.
"Because he hasn't any morals," said the little girl, fresh from a
Sunday-school lesson.
Saturday night Mr. Fielding stayed late in the city, and Dick was with
his lady-love at the Vails; so the Bishop, after dining alone, went down
on the wide beach below the house and walked, as he smoked his cigar.
Through the week he had been restless under the constant prick of a duty
undone, which he could not make up his mind to do. Over and over he
heard his friend's agitated voice. "If you had had temptations like
mine, trials like mine, I would try to follow you," it said. He knew
that the man would be good as his word. He could perhaps win Dick's
happiness for him if he would pick up the gauntlet of that speech. If he
could bring himself to tell Fielding the whole story that he had shut so
long ago into silence--that he, too, had cared for Eleanor Gray, and had
given her up in a harder way than the other, for the Bishop had made it
possible that the Southerner should marry her. But it was like tearing
his soul to do it. No one but his mother, who was dead, had known this
one secret of a life like crystal. The Bishop's reticence was the
intense sort, that often goes with a frank exterior, and he had never
cared for another woman. Some men's hearts are open pleasure-grounds,
where all the world may come and go, and the earth is dusty with many
feet; and some are like theatres, shut perhaps to the world in general,
but which a passport of beauty or charm may always open; and with many,
of finer clay, there are but two or three ways into a guarded temple,
and only the touchstone of quality may let pass the lightest foot upon
the carefully tended sod. But now and then a heart is Holy of Holies.
Long ago the Bishop, lifting a young face from the books that absorbed
him, had seen a girl's figure filling the narrow doorway, and dazzled by
the radiance of it, had placed that image on the lonely altar, where the
flame waited, before unconsecrated. Then the girl had gone, and he had
quietly shut the door and lived his life outside. But the sealed place
was there, and the fire burned before the old picture. Why should he,
for Dick Fielding, for any one, let the light of day upon that
stillness? The one thing in life that was his own, and all these years
he had kept it sacred--why should he? Fiercely, with the old animal
jealousy of ownership, he guarded for himself that memory--what was
there on earth that could make him share it? And in answer there rose
before him the vision of Madge Preston, with a haunting air of her
mother about her; of young Dick Fielding, almost his own child from
babyhood, his honest soul torn between two duties; of old Dick Fielding,
loyal and kind and obstinate, his stubborn feet, the feet that had
walked near his for forty years, needing only a touch to turn them into
the right path.
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