THAT night the had a temperature of a hundred and a half. The doctor pronounced him to be in a state of intense mental excitement, by some drug. He was a doctor modern and clear-minded enough to admit that he could not identify the drug. He overruled, every one overruled, the bishop's declaration that he had done with the church, that he could never mock God with his episcopal ministrations again, that he must proceed at once with his resignation. “Don't think of these things,” said the doctor. “Banish them from your mind until your temperature is down to ninety-eight. Then after a rest you may go into them.”
Lady Ella insisted upon his keeping his room. It was with difficulty that he got her to admit Whippham, and Whippham was in order. “You need not trouble about anything now, my lord,” he said. “Everything will keep until you are ready to attend to it. It's well we're through with Easter. Bishop Buncombe of Eastern Blowdesia was coming here anyhow. And there is Canon . There's only two candidates because of the war. We'll get on swimmingly.”
The bishop thought he would like to talk to those two ordination candidates, but they prevailed upon him not to do so. He lay for the best part of one night things to two imaginary ordination candidates.
He developed a marked for Eleanor's company. She was home again now after a visit to some friends. It was that the best thing to do with him would be to send him away in her charge. A journey abroad was impossible. France would remind him too dreadfully of the war. His own mind turned suddenly to the sweet air of Hunstanton. He had gone there at times to read, in the old Cambridge days. “It is a terribly ugly place,” he said, “but it is wine in the .”
Lady Ella was doubtful about Zeppelins. Thrice they had been right over Hunstanton already. They came in by the easy of the Wash.
“It will interest him,” said Eleanor, who knew her father better.
(2)
One warm and still and sunny afternoon the bishop found himself looking out upon the waters of the Wash. He sat where the highest layers of the beach reached up to a little cliff of sandy earth perhaps a foot high, and he looked upon sands and sea and sky and saw that they were beautiful.
He was a little black-gaitered object in a scene of the most and delicate colour. Right and left of him stretched the low grey salted shore, pale banks of marly earth by green-grey wiry grass that held and was half buried in fine blown sand. Above, the heavens made a complete hemisphere of blue in which a series of remote cumulus clouds floated and dissolved. Before him spread the long levels of the sands, and far away at its utmost was the sea. Eleanor had gone to explore the black of a fishing-boat that lay at the edge of a shallow . She was a little pink-footed figure, very bright and . She had for a time to shameless childishness; she had hidden her stockings among the reeds of the bank, and she was running to and fro, from star-fish to razor shell and from cockle to weed. The was pale drab and purple close at hand, but to the , towards Hunstanton, the sands became brown and purple, and were presently broken up into endless skerries of low flat weed-covered and little intensely blue pools. The sea was a band of that became silver to the west; it met the silver shining sands in one delicate breathing edge of intensely white . Remote to the west, very small and black and clear against the afternoon sky, was a cart, and about it was a score or so of mussel-gatherers. A little nearer, on an apparently empty stretch of shining wet sand, a multitude of was mysteriously busy. These two groups of activities and Eleanor's flitting movements did but set off and emphasize the immense and .
For a long time the bishop sat passively receptive to this healing beauty. Then a little flow of thought began and gathered in his mind. He had come out to think over two letters that he had brought with him. He drew these now rather reluctantly from his pocket, and after a long pause over the envelopes began to read them.
He reread Likeman's letter first.
Likeman could not forgive him.
“My dear Scrope,” he wrote, “your explanation explains nothing. This declaration of infidelity to our mother church, made under the most damning and circumstances in the presence of young and tender minds to your ministrations, and in of the engagements implied in the service, confirms my worst of the weaknesses of your character. I have always felt the touch of in your , the to be pseudo-deeper, pseudo-simpler than us all, the need of personal excitement. I know that you were never quite to believe in God at . You wanted to be taken notice of—personally. Except for some few hints to you, I have never breathed a word of these doubts to any human being; I have always hoped that the that comes with years and experience would give you an increasing strength against the dangers of emotionalism and against your strong, deep, quiet sense of your exceptional personal importance....”
The bishop read thus far, and then sat reflecting.
Was it just?
He had many weaknesses, but had he this egotism? No; that wasn't the justice of the case. The old man, bitterly disappointed, was endeavouring to wound. Scrope asked himself whether he was to blame for that disappointment. That was a more difficult question....
He dismissed the charge at last, up the letter in his hand, and after a moment's flung it away.... But he remained acutely sorry, not so much for himself as for the revelation of Likeman this letter made. He had had a great affection for Likeman and suddenly it was turned into a wound.
(3)
The second letter was from Lady Sunderbund, and it was an altogether more remarkable document. Lady Sunderbund wrote on a notepaper that was evidently the result of a research, but she wrote a letter far more coherent than her speech, and without that curious falling away of the r's that flavoured even her gravest observations with an unjust faint of . She wrote with a thin pen in a rounded boyish handwriting. She italicized with of the pen.
He held this letter in both hands between his knees, and considered it now with an expression that brought his forward until they almost met, and that tucked in the corners of his mouth.
“My dear Bishop,” it began.
“I keep thinking and thinking and thinking of that wonderful service, of the wonderful, wonderful things you said, and the wonderful choice you made of the moment to say them—when all those young lives were coming to the great serious thing in life. It was most beautifully done. At any rate, dear Bishop and Teacher, it was most beautifully begun. And now we all stand to you like because you have given us so much that you owe us ever so much more. You have started us and you have to go on with us. You have broken the shell of the old church, and here we are running about with nowhere to go. You have to make the shelter of a new church now for us, of errors, looking straight to God. The King of Mankind!—what a wonderful, wonderful phrase that is. It says everything. Tell us more of him and more. Count me first—not foremost, but just the little one that runs in first—among your . They say you are resigning your position in the church. Of course that must be true. You are coming out of it—what did you call it?—coming out of the cracked old from which you have poured the living waters. I called on Lady Ella yesterday. She did not tell me very much; I think she is a very reserved as well as a very woman, but she said that you intended to go to London. In London then I suppose you will set up the first altar to the Divine King. I want to help.
“Dear Bishop and Teacher, I want to help tremendously—with all my heart and all my soul. I want to be let do things for you.” (The “you” was by three or four rapid slashes, and “our King” substituted.)
“I want to be privileged to help build that First Church of the World under God. It is a dreadful thing to says but, you see, I am very rich; this dreadful war has made me ever so much richer—steel and and things—it is my trustees have done it. I am ashamed to be so rich. I want to give. I want to give and help this great beginning of yours. I want you to let me help on the temporal side, to make it easy for you to stand and deliver your message, amidst suitable surroundings and without any worries on account of the sacrifices you have made. Please do not turn my offering aside. I have never wanted anything so much in all my life as I want to make this gift. Unless I can make it I feel that for me there is no ! I shall stick with my loads and loads of stocks and shares and horrid possessions outside the Needle's Eye. But if I could build a temple for God, and just live somewhere near it so as to be the poor woman who sweeps out the , and die perhaps and be buried under its floor! Don't smile at me. I mean every word of it. Years ago I thought of such a thing. After I had visited the Certosa di Pavia—do you know it? So beautiful, and those two still figures—recumbent. But until now I could never see my way to any such service. Now I do. I am all afire to do it. Help me! Tell me! Let me stand behind you and make your mission possible. I feel I have come to the most wonderful phase in my life. I feel my call has come....
“I have written this letter over three times, and torn each of them up. I do so want to say all this, and it is so hard to say. I am full of fears that you despise me. I know there is a sort of high colour about me. My passion for brightness. I am absurd. But inside of me is a soul, a real, living, breathing soul. Crying out to you: 'Oh, let me help! Let me help!' I will do anything, I will endure anything if only I can keep hold of the vision splendid you gave me in the cathedral. I see it now day and night, the dream of the place I can make for you—and you preaching! My fingers to begin. The day before yesterday I said to myself, 'I am quite unworthy, I am a worldly woman, a rich, smart, decorated woman. He will never accept me as I am.' I took off all my jewels, every one, I looked through all my clothes, and at last I decided I would have made for me a very simple straight grey dress, just simple and straight and grey. Perhaps you will think that too is absurd of me, too self-conscious. I would not tell of it to you if I did not want you to understand how alive I am to my utter impossibilities, how resolved I am to do anything so that I may be able to serve. But never mind about silly me; let me tell you how I see the new church.
“I think you ought to have some place near the centre of London; not too west, for you might easily become fashionable, not too east because you might easily be swallowed up in merely philanthropic work, but somewhere between the two. There must be vacant sites still to be got round about Kingsway. And there we must set up your tabernacle, a very plain, very simple, very beautifully proportioned building in which you can give your message. I know a young man, just the very young man to do something of the sort, something quite new, quite modern, and yet solemn and serious. Lady Ella seemed to think you wanted to live somewhere in the north-west of London—but she would ............