Part 2 (1/2)

”Will you give me a kiss, too, for 'Good-morning,'” he said; and then, ”That's better than the flowers. You had better run back to Aunt Basha now, Eleanor--she'll be frightened.”

Eleanor looked disappointed, ”I wanted to ask you 'bout what dead chickens gets to be, if they're good. Pups? Do you reckon it's pups?”

The theory of transmigration of souls had taken strong hold. Mr.

Fielding lost his scowl in a look of bewilderment, and the Bishop frankly shouted out a big laugh.

”Listen, Eleanor. This afternoon I'll come for you to walk, and we'll talk that all over. Go home now, my lamb.” And Eleanor, like a pale-pink over-sized b.u.t.terfly, went.

”Do you know that child, Jim?” Mr. Fielding asked, grimly.

”Yes,” answered the Bishop, with a serene pull at his cigar.

”Do you know she's the child of that good-for-nothing Fairfax Preston, who married Eleanor Gray against her people's will and took her South to--to--starve, practically?”

The Bishop drew a long breath, and then he turned and looked at his old friend with a clear, wide gaze. ”She's Eleanor Gray's child, too, d.i.c.k,”

he said.

Mr. Fielding was silent a moment. ”Has the boy talked to you?” he asked.

The Bishop nodded. ”It's the worst trouble I've ever had. It would kill me to see him marry that man's daughter. I can't and won't resign myself to it. Why should I? Why should d.i.c.k choose, out of all the world, the one girl in it who would be insufferable to me. I can't give in about this. Much as d.i.c.k is to me I'll let him go sooner. I hope you'll see I'm right, Jim, but right or wrong, I've made up my mind.”

The Bishop stretched a large, bony hand across the little table that stood between them. Fielding's fell on it. Both men smoked silently for a minute.

”Have you anything against the girl, d.i.c.k?” asked the Bishop, presently.

”That she's her father's daughter--it's enough. The bad blood of generations is in her. I don't like the South--I don't like Southerners. And I detest beyond words Fairfax Preston. But the girl is certainly beautiful, and they say she is a good girl, too,” he acknowledged, gloomily.

”Then I think you're wrong,” said the Bishop.

”You don't understand, Jim,” Fielding took it up pa.s.sionately. ”That man has been the _bete noir_ of my life. He has gotten in my way half-a-dozen times deliberately, in business affairs, little as he amounts to himself. Only two years ago--but that isn't the point after all.” He stopped gloomily. ”You'll wonder at me, but it's an older feud than that. I've never told anyone, but I want you to understand, Jim, how impossible this affair is.” He bit off the end of a fresh cigar, lighted it and then threw it across the geraniums into the gra.s.s. ”I wanted to marry her mother,” he said, brusquely. ”That man got her. Of course, I could have forgiven that, but it was the way he did it. He lied to her--he threw it in my teeth that I had failed. Can't you see how I shall never forgive him--never, while I live!” The intensity of a life-long, silent hatred trembled in his voice.

”It's the very thing it's your business to do, d.i.c.k,” said the Bishop, quietly. ”'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you'--what do you think that means? It's your very case. It may be the hardest thing in the world, but it's the simplest, most obvious.” He drew a long puff at his cigar, and looked over the flowers to the ocean.

”Simple! Obvious!” Fielding's voice was full of bitterness. ”That's the way with you churchmen! You live outside pa.s.sions and temptations, and then preach against them, with no faintest notion of their force. It sounds easy, doesn't it? Simple and obvious, as you say. You never loved Eleanor Gray, Jim; you never had to give her up to a man you knew beneath her; you never had to shut murder out of your heart when you heard that he'd given her a hard life and a glad death. Eleanor Gray! Do you remember how lovely she was, how high-spirited and full of the joy of life?” The Bishop's great figure was still as if the breath in it had stopped, but Fielding, carried on the flood of his own rus.h.i.+ng feeling, did not notice. ”Do you remember, Jim?” he repeated.

”I remember,” the Bishop said, and his voice sounded very quiet.

”Jove! How calm you are!” exploded the other.

”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, d.i.c.k,” 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 _metier_ to preach against human pa.s.sion, 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, d.i.c.k--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, d.i.c.k.”

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.