THAT night the bishop had a temperature of a hundred and a half.The doctor pronounced him to be in a state of intense mental excitement, aggravated 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 exasperatingly 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 Bliss.There's only two ordination 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 confiding remarkable things to two imaginary ordination candidates.
He developed a marked liking for Eleanor's company.She was home again now after a visit to some friends.It was decided 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 veins."Lady Ella was doubtful about Zeppelins.Thrice they had been right over Hunstanton already.They came in by the easy landmark 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 pebble 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 exquisite and delicate colour.Right and left of him stretched the low grey salted shore, pale banks of marly earth surmounted 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 ebb was the sea.Eleanor had gone to explore the black ribs of a wrecked fishing-boat that lay at the edge of a shallow lagoon.She was a little pink-footed figure, very bright and apparently transparent.She had reverted 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 shingle was pale drab and purple close at hand, but to the westward, towards Hunstanton, the sands became brown and purple, and were presently broken up into endless skerries of low flat weed-covered boulders and little intensely blue pools.The sea was a band of sapphire that became silver to the west; it met the silver shining sands in one delicate breathing edge of intensely white foam.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.Alittle nearer, on an apparently empty stretch of shining wet sand, a multitude of gulls was mysteriously busy.These two groups of activities and Eleanor's flitting translucent movements did but set off and emphasize the immense and soothing tranquillity.
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 sensational declaration of infidelity to our mother church, made under the most damning and distressing circumstances in the presence of young and tender minds entrusted to your ministrations, and in defiance of the honourable engagements implied in the confirmation service, confirms my worst apprehensions of the weaknesses of your character.I have always felt the touch of theatricality in your temperament, the peculiar craving to be pseudo-deeper, pseudo-******r than us all, the need of personal excitement.I know that you were never quite contented to believe in God at second-hand.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 ripening 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, crumpled up the letter in his hand, and after a moment's hesitation 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)
