TttAROMOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT - G OSGAR fAY ADAMS THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT AND OTHER STORIES THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT. THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT AND OTHER STORIES BY OSCAR FAY ADAMS AUTHOR OF "THE STORY OF JANE AUSTEN'S LIFE," POST-LAUREATE IDYLS," "THE PRESUMPTION OF SEX,' : "A DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN AUTHORS" BOSTON L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY (INCORPORATED) 1899 Copyright, 1899 BY L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY (INCORPORATED) Colonial Press* Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co. Boston, Mass., U.S.A. TO THE FRIENDS AT "CARISBROOK" 2041547 . AUTHOR'S NOTE. " The Archbishop's Unguarded Moment " and " Why the Bishop Left Rye Beach " were originally printed in The Cosmopolitan, " The Serious Dilemma of the Bishop of Oklaho" in Munsey's Magazine, "The Evolution of a Bishop " in the New England Maga- zine, and " A Night with William of Wykeham " in " Vignettes," a collection of short stories issued by De Wolfe, Fiske & Co. The author takes this occa- sion to express his obligations to the various pub- lishers of the above named for permission to include these stories in the present volume. CONTENTS. THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT . n THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP . . . . 57 WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH ... 91 THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP . . . 145 A NIGHT WITH WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM . . 183 THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP . . 201 THE SERIOUS DILEMMA OF THE BISHOP OF OKLAHO 2 37 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT WHEN the Reverend Walter Noel se- cured the living of St. Michael-at- Plea in the city of Norwich, all the clergy of Norfolk exclaimed as one clergyman : " Noel is just the man for the place." Similarly had every one who knew him exclaimed when he had previously become curate in charge at Great Snoring. He had been for five years in this remote country parish when the living of St. Michael-at-Plea was offered to him, and, if the expression may be used of an embryo archbishop, he jumped at the offer. 12 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT And there was no good reason why he should not have done so, either. The living of St. Michael-at-Plea, though it had not a large stipend attached to it, was certainly better worth having than a curacy in so remote a part of Norfolk as Great Snoring, and, then too, the Reverend Walter liked urban much better than he did country life. But to counsel with his likings was some- thing he had hitherto little opportunity of doing. In his college and university life at Winchester and Oxford he had always been distinguished for doing everything assigned to him with ready cheerfulness, never allow- ing himself to murmur even when manifestly imposed upon. Consequently, when his uni- versity friends heard of his going to Great Snoring, they pronounced him to be just the man for the place, as the absentee vicar would never be able to find another curate who would fulfil all his demands with such conscientious fidelity as Noel would be sure to do. And Reverend Jonas Steele, Vicar of Great Snoring and Canon Residentiary THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT I 3 of Norwich Cathedral, very soon found that he had secured a treasure. This dignitary had very comprehensive ideas as to the duties to be performed by his curate in charge, and was delighted to find that his new acquisition raised no objection to any- thing exacted from him. But the canon and his diocesan, the Lord Bishop of Norwich, were not, I am sorry to be obliged to state, on such good terms as could be desired. The East Anglian prel- ate had been heard to express in very plain terms, in the course of conversation at vari- ous times, his opinion of non-resident vicars who did all their parish duties by proxy. Every one knew that his lordship had in mind the Vicar of Great Snoring, and the vicar, who knew perfectly well what his bishop thought of him, knew also that every one was saying of him to themselves: " Thou art the man." Therefore he raged inwardly like a very heathen and imagined all kinds of vain things in revenge. Opportunity for revenge came in the 14 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT month when he was next in residence at the cathedral. There was to be a consecra- tion of a bishop suffragan in the cathedral on Trinity Sunday, and the Reverend Canon Steele was selected as preacher on that occasion. It was the canon's great oppor- tunity and he improved it to the utmost. The subject of his discourse was the ideal bishop, and, by way of setting forth the per- fections of this ideal personage to fullest ad- vantage, he drew a strongly outlined picture of the actual bishop, in the scarcely attrac- tive description of whom it was not difficult for most persons present to recognise the prominent characteristics, somewhat dis- torted, it is true, of the East Anglian prelate then and there present before them on his throne. The dean, it must be said, privately en- joyed watching the flight of this arrow speeding from pulpit to episcopal throne, for he had had some minor disagreements with the bishop himself in times past; but he did not approve the canon's audacity, THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT 15 nevertheless. The prelate listened to this astounding discourse with a calm exterior, but conscious of a wild desire through it all to fling the cushions of the throne at the impertinent canon. That he restrained this natural feeling goes without saying, for what are bishops for if not to show us how the natural man may be, like Satan, beaten down under our feet? When the cere- monies of the morning were over he lent an approving ear to the remarks of some of his clergy upon the subject, who to a man con- demned the course of the canon. At lunch- eon in the palace, where he had as guests the Bishops of Ely and Lincoln, his own newly consecrated suffragan, and the dean, the subject was resumed. " There ought to be some way to silence a pestilent fellow like that," said the Bishop of Ely, and the diocesan of Lincoln asked the dean if there were no way by which the man could be ejected from his place in the chapter. " I can punish him in a most effective 1 6 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT way, I think," said the Bishop of Norwich. " The living at St. Michael-at-Plea is in my gift, as perhaps you know, and is just now vacant. I shall offer it to Noel, the curate in charge at Great Snoring. He is a hard and faithful worker, and Steele will not find it easy to replace him." The bishop kept his word, and two days later the curate in charge at Great Snoring was offered the living of St. Michael-at-Plea, and with the offer was coupled the urgent desire of his diocesan that he should accept it. As before intimated, the offer was ac- cepted with very little hesitation, and thus the Vicar of Great Snoring lost his efficient curate, the urban parish of St. Michael-at- Plea gained an industrious rector, and the bishop had his revenge upon the canon, if one may venture to couple a bishop and revenge in the same sentence. The Reverend Walter Noel did his duty as faithfully in his new position as he had ever done in his old one, and this was not in all things an easy matter, for on any and every THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT 17 parish matter the churchwardens of St. Michael-at-Plea made it their business to hold opinions exactly opposed to those of their rector. This was done, not because they disliked him, but by reason of the perverse nature of churchwardens in gen- eral, and in this respect the wardens of St. Michael-at-Plea offered no marked variation from the recognised type. The Bishop of Norwich was disposed to be very friendly to the new rector of St. Michael-at-Plea, and if the prelate's office had been a less exalted one, had he been his own suffragan, for example, it might have been thought that this friendliness had its origin in the bishop's enmity to the absentee Vicar of Great Snoring, and was exhibited with the purpose of further annoying him. Be this as it may have been, the Reverend Walter Noel was continually invited to the palace, and it was rumoured in both the Upper and the Lower Close after a time that the bishop's daughter was as well-disposed toward the Reverend Walter 1 8 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT as her right reverend father. As the bishop's favourite was a handsome young fellow of twenty-eight, with manners which pleasea nearly every one, whether gentle or simple, the explanation of the general good-will felt toward him at the palace was not so very hard for the unprejudiced mind to discover. This marked favour to his late curate was naturally very displeasing to the canon, who lived in the Lower Close, and knew precisely how young Noel was honoured by his dio- cesan. It was all the more vexing to him because he had not yet found a curate who could perform his duties for him at Great Snoring as satisfactorily as the present incumbent of St. Michael-at-Plea had done. Consequently he nourished a grudge against the Reverend Walter quite as strong as that hitherto felt by him for the prelate of East Anglia. The gossip about the bishop's daughter and his late curate in charge was especially annoying to him. Not that he himself aspired to the hand of the young woman, THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT 1 9 for he did not. In fact, he could not have done so, for he had a wife already. Even if the bishop's daughter would have consented to marry him under existing circumstances, in the impossible event of the bishop's and Mrs. Steele's joint approval, he was very well aware that, although the prayer-book has nothing to say upon the subject of vicars and canons residentiary taking unto themselves more than one wife at a time, it does say very distinctly that bishops shall not do so. Consequently, as the Reverend Jonas Steele hoped some day to become a bishop, he was not likely to imperil his pros- pects in that direction by any imitation of Turkish or Mormon practices, even had his views been lax in such matters, which they most certainly were not. But his feeling against the possible marriage of the two people about whom the mild gossip of the Upper as well as the Lower Close was now centering was quite as strong as if he had been the jealous rival of the Reverend Walter. 2O THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT But, though strong, it was perforce a feel- ing which could not be resolved into active opposition. He could not go about telling tales of his former curate, even had there been any but creditable ones to tell. Nor could he go to the bishop and endeavour to prejudice that misguided church dignitary against the young rector of St. Michael-at- Plea. The relations between himself and his superior were already so strained that the two gentlemen avoided each other as far as possible, and it was not to be ex- pected that the bishop would pay much attention to his unfriendly canon upon this of all topics. He did endeavour to sound the dean in regard to the favour shown by the inmates of the palace to the new incum- bent of St. Michael-at-Plea, but the dean became suddenly frigid, and the canon per- ceived that no effective remonstrance was to be expected from that quarter. As time wore on matters seemed to adjust themselves more and more in accordance with the hopes of the Reverend Walter, and THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT 21 less and less in harmony with the wishes of the Reverend Jonas, and when at last the engagement of the bishop's daughter to his former curate was publicly announced, the canon started for a tour on the continent, presumably breathing out threatenings and slaughter by the way. As ill luck would have it, he returned on the very day of the wedding of these two, and as he alighted from the train at the Victoria station the marriage peals from the cathedral tower, supplemented by the bells of St. Michael- at-Plea, St. Peter Mancroft, St. Miles's Cos- lany, St. John Maddermarket, and the thirty other parish churches of the city, made such a joyful din that the poor canon was driven nearly distracted. However, rage as he might, the marriage was a settled fact not to be gainsaid, and there were certain matters of social cere- mony to be observed by him in relation to the event which he could not neglect, or perhaps it would be more correct to say which his wife would not allow him to omit. 22 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT And the Reverend Jonas Steele, although he did not care a brass farthing for his bishop, which was certainly not greatly to his credit, was very much in awe of his wife, and usually executed her commands without much hesitation. To do fullest justice to the potentate of his household, she was not usually unreasonable in her behests. While it might have been thought that the bishop's daughter had not done very well for herself in marrying the rector of St. Michael-at-Plea, it was generally acknowl- edged that young Noel had most decidedly bettered his condition by becoming the son- in-law of the Lord Bishop of Norwich. The bishop was beyond question fond of this handsome and deferential son-in-law of his, and favoured him, as was not unnatural, above many clergymen who had been much longer in the diocese, not to say in orders. But this excited no jealousy save in one house in the Lower Close, inhabited by Canon Steele. Through the bishop's influ- ence backed by that of the dean, the Rever- THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT 23 end Walter was preferred, after a year or two, to a minor canonry at the cathedral, an office which he could hold without interfering in any important degree with his duties as rector of St. Michael-at-Plea. What his former vicar thought of this advancement need not perhaps be enlarged upon. But, much to the elder clergyman's chagrin, he could not open his mouth to protest, since the only lawful ground upon which protestation could be placed was that afforded by the plurality of livings now held by the younger man ; and as his aggrieved opponent was at one and the same time Vicar of Great Snoring and Canon Residen- tiary of the Diocese of Norwich, it was mani- festly unwise for him to invite discussion of the plurality question. Still, the envious vicar might in time have forgiven his former curate for his present prosperity had it reached no higher pitch. But fortune was not yet done with the Reverend Walter Noel, and had still a kindly eye upon him. Thus it happened 24 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT that, three years after his acceptance of the minor canonry, the colonial Bishop of Atha- basca and Anticosti dying of old age, the vacant episcopate was offered to the son- in-law of the prelate of East Anglia. Of course it was accepted. How should a minor canon presume to oppose the will of heaven as interpreted by the prime min- ister? And if he had wished to decline the honour his wife would not have listened calmly to such a proposal for one moment. To be daughter of one bishop and wife of another was such a distinction as fell to the lot of but few women, and she was deeply sensible of its value, although quite sure it was no less than she deserved. But she was not called upon to argue the case with her husband, who allowed, however, a digni- fied interval of delay to follow announce- ment and precede acceptance. Delay did not imply hesitation in obedience to com- mand. Like the worthy captain of the Man- telpiece, " it was his duty, and he did." Nearly every one was disposed to think THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT 25 that the influence of the Bishop of Norwich had been exerted to bring about his son-in- law's elevation to the colonial episcopate. The Vicar of Great Snoring attributed this result to the craft and subtlety of the devil, but, sad to say, this represented to his mind very much the same thing as what his fellow men called the influence of their revered bishop. Which all goes to show how en- tirely the natural man may remain unsub- dued even when one is a vicar and a canon residentiary to boot. But the Reverend Jonas Steele was forced to digest the venom of his spleen as he best could and see his former curate elevated to the episcopate with such calmness as he was able to summon to such a sight. The Bishop of Norwich, who knew very well his canon's perturbed state of mind at this period, was strenuously polite to his enemy in the Lower Close, and took scrupulous pains to have him invited to every social entertainment given in honour of the new bishop before his departure. And to these 26 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT festivities, willy-nilly, he went, Mrs. Steele making it plainly apparent that no other course was open for his adoption. It was therefore a happy day for him when the new Bishop of Athabasca and Anticosti was fairly embarked for the journey to that distant diocese, and he hoped that that prel- ate would never again cross his path. Yet it was no bed of flowery ease to which the Right Reverend Walter Noel was trav- elling with his ambitious wife, and if his enemy in the Lower Close at Norwich could have had a more definite knowledge of the trials incident to the life of a colonial bishop in British America he would have felt much better reconciled to the promotion of his old-time curate. With that pleasing indifference to consid- erations of distance and of geography gen- erally which characterises the framers of colonial sees, the diocese over which the former incumbent of St. Michael-at-Plea was now to extend beneficent sway was composed of two portions of Her Gracious THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT 27 Majesty's possessions in North America, some five thousand miles apart. The west- ern division skirted the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains much nearer to the Arctic Circle than would be at all desirable for continued residence, in the opinion of most people, and the eastern portion con- sisted of the nearly barren and wholly unat- tractive island of Anticosti, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. If Mrs. Noel had indulged herself in the hope of being mis- tress of an episcopal palace once more, she was soon convinced of the folly of such hopes. The few churches were rough log structures, and the episcopal palaces were the rude log hut on the western shore of Lake Athabasca, where the Noels's resi- dence was nominally fixed for one-half the year, and the equally humble frame building in a secluded valley on the southern side of Anticosti, where they were supposed to dwell during the other half. In reality they passed very little time in either abode, for their journeys to and from Athabasca and 28 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT Anticosti occupied many tedious weeks, and the bishop found it necessary to be continu- ally moving about through the Athabascan district, as well as the island part of his bishopric, in sledges and on snow-shoes in winter and in summer in canoes. And whenever it was practicable for her to do so, Mrs. Noel accompanied him. Perhaps it might not be exactly true to state that the bishop enjoyed an existence of this nature, which offered about as little chance for the indulgence of dignified epis- copal repose as the life of a porter at a bustling railway junction ; but he thrived under its hard discipline and did his duty in that station of life to which it had pleased God to call him, with commendable fidelity to the teachings of the catechism. As was to be expected, the change from the pleasant and familiar activities of life at the East Anglian capital to the nomadic existence which was now the lot of the Noels in the wilds of British America was felt most strongly by the bishop's wife. But pride THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT 29 helped her to face the situation bravely and accept its privations with fortitude. And in the most trying times it was a consolation to feel that she was a bishop's wife, no less than a bishop's daughter. Still there were moments when both realised that their enemy in the Lower Close would have little occasion to think they had triumphed over him could he know just how their life was passed in those hyperborean latitudes. But I do not imagine that the Norwich friends or foes of Bishop and Mrs. Noel ever gained a very clear notion of what life was like in either Athabasca or Anticosti, for Mrs. Noel, who attended to the corre- spondence, was far from explicit as to her details, and enlarged only upon the pleas- antest features of residence in her husband's see. Norwich vaguely surmised that no such gray old cathedral as its own was to be found in Athabasca, and gathered that travelling was sometimes a little difficult in cold weather, but whether this latter were owing to the want of good post-horses, or 30 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT because the railway carriages were imper- fectly heated, was not precisely clear to the Norwich mind, and, thanks to Mrs. Noel, it knew very little more than this. And the Vicar of Great Snoring still absented him- self from his rural parish from year's end to year's end, and abode in the Lower Close nourishing his wrath against the distant Bishop of Athabasca and Anticosti, a wrath continually fermented by frequent meetings with his other foe of the episco- pate, the occupant of the palace at the north side of the cathedral. One morning, some five years after the departure of Bishop Noel from Norwich, the diocesan of Norwich and the dean, while passing out of the Upper Close by way of the southern or Ethelbert Gate- way, met the Reverend Jonas Steele just turning out of St. Faith's Lane, close at hand. " Good morning, Mr. Steele," said the prelate, blandly. " I have some news that ought to please you. The dean and I have THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT 31 just heard that my son-in-law, the Bishop of Athabasca and Anticosti, you know, is likely to be preferred to the archbishopric of St. Lucia." It must be admitted that the bishop chose his words well. He did not say, as another and a clumsier man might have said, " I have some news which I am sure will please you," thereby running directly counter to the truth at the very start. He merely alluded to the intelligence as information which ought to please his hearer. And he was quite right in putting it thus, for the canon being presumably, and certainly ex officio, a Christian, ought naturally to have been pleased at the good fortune which had fallen to the lot of his former curate. But his face expressed anything but friendly pleasure at this moment. He glared for an instant at the dean and his companion, mumbled something not very intelligible, that might have been indicative of joy at the news, but sounded very unlike it, added that he was in great haste just then, and 32 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT hurried away under Ethelbert's dark arch into the Upper Close. " He has never forgiven you for what you said about absenteeism years ago, nor for depriving him of his curate in charge," said the dean as they walked on. " No," said the bishop, as calmly as if the fact did not disturb him in the least, but was on the whole rather satisfying to contem- plate ; " I don't think he has." After all, the Reverend Jonas was not in such great haste, as it proved, for while he was still in sight of his ecclesiastical supe- riors he turned and shook his fist at his bishop's retreating back, a high-handed proceeding, so to speak, and one not to be commended, although not expressly forbid- den by the rubrics, perhaps because the commission of such an act was never con- templated as a possibility by the framers of those ecclesiastical barbed-wire fences. " I don't believe it is true," he said, half aloud, and quite unaware that his extraordinary gesture had been witnessed by half a dozen THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT 33 wondering tourists sauntering through the Upper Close. But in his heart he felt that it must be true all the same, and confirmation of the bishop's words followed quickly. In a very little while all Norwich had heard that Bishop Noel was offered the archbishopric of St. Lucia, with jurisdiction over Grenada and St. Vincent also, and later it knew that the office had been accepted, and that the Bishop of Athabasca and Anticosti was coming back to England to be consecrated, and to remain for a few weeks before taking up the duties of his archdiocese in the West Indies. Then, three months later, the much discussed dig- nitary returned to Norwich with his wife. And Norwich received the archbishop in posse with open arms. Of course the consecration was to be in the cathedral of the East Anglian diocese, and a most imposing ceremony it was when it took place. More than half of the Angli- can episcopate was present on the occasion, and deans, archdeacons, and canons of every 34 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT degree were as plentiful as blackberries in a hedge. The office of consecration was begun by the Bishop of Ely, and to him succeeded his neighbour of Peterborough, who read the epistle, and his lordship of Lincoln, who read the gospel. After this the colonial prelate was presented to the Primate of Canterbury by the Archbishops of York and Armagh, and in due form was made Archbishop of St. Lucia and the adja- cent islands of Grenada and St. Vincent, and vested with the archiepiscopal habit. It is, perhaps, needless to state that the sermon at this consecration was not deliv- ered by the Reverend Canon Steele, who by this time was quite too full of the emo- tions specified in the latter half of the seventh petition of the Litany to be able to speak the truth in love from the cathedral pulpit. Instead, the preacher was the lord spiritual of Norwich, who was at this time more eloquent than usual, it was generally remarked. As he mounted the pulpit stairs he caught the baleful glance of Canon Steele, THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT 35 who was frowning blackly in his stall next the dean, and the visual encounter lent a ring of exultation to the bishop's first words, as those of one who drinks delight of battle when bounding into the arena of conflict. Not that he regarded the Reverend Jonas Steele as one of his peers by any means. Far from it. The ceremony of consecration was a pro- tracted one, but as the rite when adminis- tered to an archbishop is far from common at Canterbury or York, and was quite un- known at Norwich, nobody complained of its length, and when it was over every one watched with regret the long train of vested and hooded archbishops, bishops, deans, and other clergy as they passed out of the choir to the robing-rooms in the south transept. The sunlight streaming through the great lights of the clerestory flashed upon the many-coloured hoods of the clergy and the scarlet gowns of one or two of the bishops who appeared in their convocation robes, and filled the glorious choir from apse to 36 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT organ with golden splendour, but utterly failed to dispel the gloom that rested upon the countenance of Canon Steele as he passed out with the rest. Later in the day a little comfort came to him, when at evensong the Psalter was chanted and he heard the clear soprano voice of James Canforth, one of the smaller choir-boys, taking as a solo the sentence, " Let his days be few and let another take his office." Once more he glanced at his diocesan, who sat on his throne as usual, and then at the new Archbishop of St. Lucia sitting in state in the apse beyond the altar. The bishop followed the direction of the glance and bit his lips in vexation as he divined of what the canon was thinking. " It was a most unfortunate thing that that solo should have come in to-day's Psalter," he thought, and a vague sense of apprehen- sion for a moment swept across him as he leaned back among the purple throne hang- ings. It was gone almost as quickly as it came, and, turning his head, he met the THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT 37 canon's gaze, once more bent on him, with a serene expression seemingly implying a mind peculiarly at peace within. Time passed rapidly enough with the archbishop, and it now wanted but a fort- night of the date when he and Mrs. Noel were to sail for Castries, the principal port of their tropical archdiocese. He was think- ing a little regretfully of this one morning as he was walking toward St. Ethelbert's Gate on his way to call upon a friend in the Upper Close. Behind him at some little distance walked the Reverend Jonas Steele seeking whom he might devour, I had almost added. Through the gateway could be seen one of the choir-boys coming toward it from the inner or Close side. Suddenly, from the dark archway of St. Faith's Lane on the right, a large pig darted at a high rate of speed directly toward the archbishop. The animal was in part re- strained by an old woman holding a rope, the other end of which was fastened about its leg. She was hurrying after him at a 38 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT pace which was not wholly of her own choos- ing, for her captive was evidently much the stronger of the two and was aware of the fact. The pig, plainly with one dominant thought, to escape from his owner, and re- garding the Archbishop of St. Lucia and islands adjacent no more than if that reverend person had been a curate on the smallest pos- sible stipend, went plunging heedlessly for- ward across the roadway. The archbishop, attempting to dodge the impetuous animal, was entangled in the coils of the long rope and thrown down in the dust of the roadway, while the pig, wrenching himself free from the rope, scampered over the prostrate digni- tary and was instantly lost to view in the Upper Close. There were three witnesses to the arch- bishop's overthrow, the old woman who had lost her pig by his unwilling assistance, the chorister, who happened to be the same that had sung in the cathedral some weeks before " Let his days be few and let another take his office," and Canon Steele. The last named THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT 39 person drew back to one side of the gateway out of sight, but near enough to hear the archbishop mutter, as he picked himself up, quite out of temper for the first time in his life, " Damn that pig." And the old woman and the choir-boy were near enough to hear the objurgation, too. Now, while I have no intention of defend- ing the archbishop, who had thus in an unguarded moment yielded to the prompt- ings of the old Adam within him, I cannot help considering that there was much in the occasion partly to excuse if not to justify his hasty exclamation. And perhaps those who are disposed to condemn his utterance in the harshest and most unqualified manner will kindly indicate what should be said on the spur of the moment by an archbishop who has been knocked down in the street by a runaway pig, and who is suffering from bruised knees, as well as from wounded dignity. Canon law is as silent as the rubrics on this point, and beyond question it is incumbent upon any man, whether he 4O THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT be humblest layman or proudest archbishop, to say something which shall not be mani- festly inappropriate to the demands of the occasion. The archbishop, as he arose, hardly noticed the presence of the old woman and the small chorister, but, brushing the dust from his coat and his torn archiepiscopal apron, he walked rapidly away from the scene of his downfall into the Upper Close, leaving the choir-boy and his companion staring after him open-mouthed. Then, and not till then, the Reverend Jonas came into view from his hiding-place. " That was the new archbishop who fell down, wasn't it ? " he asked of the boy. " That it was, sir," replied the other, doff- ing his cap as he spoke. " I trust he wasn't much hurt," continued the canon, amiably ; " I thought I heard him groan as I came up." "That was him a-cussin', sir," said the choir-boy, becoming voluble. "Oh, sir, he cussed that pig just awful." THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT 4! " That he did," interposed the old woman, " and there's not a finer pig in Norwich, which was meanin' 'im no 'arm if he 'adn't got in the way like, as no pig will stand from any man." " Well, I wouldn't say any more about it," said the canon, serenely. " Perhaps you both misunderstood him." Then turning to the boy, he added, in a lower tone, as he put a sixpence into the fingers that closed quickly upon it : " Come to my house this afternoon, Canforth, at two o'clock, I have something I want to say to you then ; and take my ad- vice and say nothing about the archbishop's accident." " That I won't, sir," was the reply, and the boy skipped rapidly away up St. Faith's Lane, and the canon was left alone with the old woman. " I think Mrs. Steele would like to see you this afternoon about washing some sur- plices, Mrs. Ridd," began the clergyman. " She has heard of your skill, and wants to test it ; so if you will go to my house in the 42 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT Lower Close about half after two, she will see you about the matter, and, by the way, I think you had best say nothing to your neighbours at present about the mishap to the new archbishop." The old woman courtesied awkwardly, and departed in pursuit of the pig whose misguided and errant career was destined to work such evil to the Establishment, and the canon walked homeward in a happier state of mind than he had been in for a long time. And there was abundant cause for self-congratulation, for the great opportunity of a lifetime was now within the eager grasp of the Reverend Jonas Steele. At precisely four o'clock on the afternoon of the same day the canon was leaving the Thorpe station for London. The Bishop of Norwich was returning from Great Yarmouth at the same time, and as the two dignitaries met in the station they recognised each other as stiffly as usual. There was, how- ever, a gleam in the canon's eyes which his diocesan did not altogether like. THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT 43 " He means mischief, I am very sure," soliloquised the bishop, on his way to the palace. " I wish I knew what he was up to now." But his lordship ascertained his canon's errand much sooner than he hoped for, and far too soon for his peace of mind. That evening the card of the Rev. Jonas Steele, Vicar of Great Snoring and Canon Residentiary of Norwich, was sent in to the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth pal- ace, and the primate was soon listening with astonished ears to grave charges against the Archbishop of St. Lucia, preferred by his visitor, and supported by the written depo- sitions before an attorney of James Canforth, chorister of Norwich Cathedral, and Mrs. Ann Ridd, laundress, residing in St. Faith's Lane, Norwich, ear witnesses to the offence charged. Two days later the episcopal city of East Anglia was shaken from centre to circum- ference by the news that its new idol, the Archbishop of St. Lucia, was charged with 44 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT the sin of profane swearing, and that he was to be summoned for trial before the highest ecclesiastical authority in the realm. For one whole day every one was sure that the news must be false, and that it was a slander upon the archbishop. Then it was whis- pered about that the accused had admitted his offence, and consternation became gen- eral. Deep gloom enveloped the palace where the archbishop and his wife were visiting her father. Mrs. Noel was ill with morti- fication, and the bishop was angry enough with the Reverend Canon Steele to have hurled at him the objurgation which his son-in-law had addressed to the pig, if that would have accomplished the end desired. He did not blame his daughter's hus- band in the least, but it did seem to the bishop the very irony of fate that the canon should have been by on the occa- sion of the archbishop's encounter with the Pig- In fact, hardly any one did seriously blame THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT 45 the archbishop. Even one of the Norwich newspapers, which headed an editorial on the important topic with the line, " But then he swore unreverend man ! " was dis- posed to take the most lenient view possible of the matter. As for the reverend culprit himself, he was quite as penitent as any one could desire, more so, his militant father-in- law thought, than was at all needful, con- sidering that his accuser was that dragon of mischief in the Lower Close. The elder man was disposed to look for historical precedent to justify the alleged offence, and instanced the fact that the famous Bishop Atterbury was sometimes heard to make use of the word " damn " when he was not engaged in the regular services of the church, but this fact, undeniable as it may have been, did not tend to remove from the archbishop's shoulders a particle of his own responsibil- ity. But if there was gloom in the palace, there was at least the shadow of a shade in one house in the Lower Close, for Mrs. 46 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT Steele had pointedly observed to her hus- band that he had meddled with what was none of his business, and that he ought to be ashamed of himself. He by no means agreed with her as to her first state- ment, and was, to tell the truth, not in the least ashamed of what he had done ; but such emphatic disapproval of him on his own hearthstone rather took the edge from his enjoyment of his rival's discom- fiture. It was now August, and the hearing of Archbishop Noel's case before the Arch- bishop of Canterbury was to be had in September. Of course, all plans for going to St. Lucia were indefinitely deferred by the Noels, who were now rarely seen out- side the cathedral precincts. Not only the diocese of Norwich, but the whole Estab- lished Church, was stirred up over the matter. The Reverend Jonas Steele was acquiring a great deal of notoriety at this juncture, but even the few persons who blamed the archbishop severely were not THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT 47 disposed to approve of the course the canon had taken. But that individual, who by this time had openly defied Mrs. Steele at least twice in regard to his line of conduct, was more than satisfied with himself, and here he possessed a decided advantage over the archbishop. These were, indeed, evil days for that dig- nitary. After living in the most exemplary fashion all his life, and bearing uncomplain- ingly all the hardships that had fallen to his lot in the past, to have now in an unguarded moment laid himself open to the darts of the adversary (the common enemy of man- kind and the foe in the Lower Close were seemingly not wholly disassociated in the archiepiscopal meditations), it was all very hard, so the archbishop thought, and his wife and father-in-law agreed with him most entirely. The solemn hearing came on at last, and all England read with eagerness the meagre accounts of it furnished to the daily papers, and waited anxiously for the primate's de- 48 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT cision. It was acknowledged on all sides that his Grace of Canterbury was placed in a most difficult position, since there was but little light to be obtained from historic precedent. Bishops had received the cen- sure of the Church before now, and not seldom, if one reckoned by centuries; but it was not often that an archbishop was brought to the bar of an ecclesiastical tribu- nal. It was true enough that the Primate of All England had been tried in the time of Charles the First, but for treason and not for profane speech, and. as he was tried by laymen and not by his peers, there was nothing to be learned by referring to the case of Archbishop Laud. As the accused did not deny the offence with which he was charged, and as, more- over, the united testimony of the canon, the choir-boy, and the laundress could not be therefore effectually disproved, the defence rested wholly upon the extenuating circum- stances connected with the case. And a very ingenious and interesting defence it THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT 49 was. How much weight it would have with the most reverend and right honour- able personage to whom it was addressed remained to be seen. The successor of St. Augustine chose to reserve his decision for a whole month, to the vexatious suspense of the entire Estab- lishment. The Archbishop of St. Lucia bore the added period of waiting much better than his right reverend relative, who by this time could not behold the obnoxious canon, in the cathedral or out of it, without experiencing a strong desire to choke him ; and had taken to attending daily prayers at St. Peter Mancroft rather than hear his enemy whose month in residence had just then come around read them at the cathedral. Late October brought with it the pri- mate's decision. It was a document of considerable length that roared aloud and thundered vaguely in the index, but became perforce more explicit as it proceeded. His lordship, after informing mankind in general, 50 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT and the clergy in particular, that the tongue is an exceedingly unruly member, needing to be held constantly in check, went on to set forth that, to the scandal of the Church " and Christianity," as the late Mrs. Proudie was accustomed to add, thereby unwittingly divorcing the Establishment from Christian- ity, the Most Reverend Archbishop of St. Lucia had in an unguarded moment been guilty of the lamentable sin of profane speaking. The offence having been tes- tified to by several competent witnesses (" Competent witnesses ! no such thing ! " stormed the Bishop of Norwich when he came to read this part of his superior's decision), as well as confessed by the arch- bishop himself, the successor of St. Augus- tine, recognising that the honour of the Church and Christianity was herein deeply involved, felt that the error was one which could not be lightly passed over. (At this point in his reading the spiritual ruler of Norwich declared that the Archbishop of Canterbury had not an atom of sense in his THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT 51 head, a declaration which to other and less impetuous minds than his lordship's might have seemed to lack fullest confirmation.) He therefore inhibited the Archbishop of St. Lucia from exercising spiritual juris- diction within the archdiocese over which he had lately been called to preside, and declared that the archiepiscopate of that region was to remain vacant until a suit- able person should be found to fill it worth- ily. (" Tautology," sneered the East Anglian prelate to himself, as he read, for rhetoric was one of the lesser dignitary's strong points. " He never could write a decent English sentence to save his life.") Further- more, the Archbishop of St. Lucia was com- manded to abstain from the performance of all clerical functions until such time as his ecclesiastical superior should deem fit and proper, and enjoined, moreover, to cultivate in the meantime a chastened sobriety of deportment. " Chastened sobriety ! " said the bishop, in a rage, as he flung the primate's decision upon the floor. " Do you hear that, 52 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT Walter ? Why, the man's an idiot," he con- tinued, half forgetting momentarily the sub- stance of the decision in his scorn for its expression. There was silence in the palace for a few moments after the reading was finished, and then the bishop burst forth again. " It is all that confounded, miserable Steele's doing," he exclaimed, angrily. " Take care," said the archbishop, trying to smile, " you may be reported to the pri- mate next and suspended ; " and then he turned away suddenly, his handsome face paling, his lips quivering, and shut himself in his room alone for hours. And the bishop knew that his beloved son- in-law had received a blow that had nearly crushed him, and pity for him and for his daughter, who would suffer through her husband, contended in the bishop's breast with the wrath he experienced against the primate and the contempt he felt for the canon, who was at the bottom of the whole miserable business. THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT 53 That night the Reverend Jonas Steele was burnt in effigy before the Erpingham Gateway of the cathedral precincts by some enthusiastic young persons, and it was rumoured in Norwich, and never authorita- tively contradicted, that these same per- sons were afterward regaled with meat and ale in the servants' hall at the pal- ace by the bishop's express orders, and for one I am quite disposed to credit the state- ment. However, to be burnt in effigy breaks no bones, and the Reverend Jonas, ignoring so far as possible the fact that he was now pretty generally detested by the clergy and laity alike in the cathedral city, and attempt- ing, with far less success, to ignore the reproaches of Mrs. Steele, was able to con- template the result of his labours with a good deal of satisfaction. He had brought low in the dust the pride and presumption of the Bishop of Norwich, and had trodden, as it were, the Archbishop of St. Lucia under his feet. He had been the unworthy 54 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT instrument, so he delighted in telling him- self, by which the honour of the Establish- ment had been abundantly vindicated, and after long years of waiting he had seen his desire upon his enemies. THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP " If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work." THE emergence of the full-blown bishop from the ordinary clerical chrysalis is, in our day and generation, one of the long results of time, though an event that in some instances dawns more speedily than in others. In bygone centuries matters were different in this respect. In those delectable times one might sometimes wear the mitre almost as soon as the toga virilis was assumed, if it happened to please certain great ones of the earth, lay and clerical, to order it thus. It was not then invariably demanded that a bishop should be no " novice, lest he be lifted up with pride." Indeed, it was expected of bishops 57 58 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT that they should be proud, St. Paul's ad- monitions to the contrary notwithstanding. Even yet, certain bearers of the crosier show lingering traces of this quality in the sight of men. But in these latest days of the Church, a man must be at least thirty years of age before his elevation to the episcopate is possible, and few there are who feel upon their brows the weight of a mitre before their fortieth milestone is passed. The office is most apt to be given to one who has turned his half century. When all this is considered, it will be seen that he who aspires in boyhood to episcopal honours in the future is certainly indulging himself in a very long look ahead. Distant as such a prospect must be, it never- theless was the one upon which Issachar Gadd saw fit to fix his gaze at a very early period in his career. The tribe of Gadd, to which young Is- sachar belonged, were veritable religious nomads. Of Puritan stock originally, they had cut loose a century back from all THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 59 definite relations with any church or sect, and, always living in the larger towns on the Atlantic seaboard, they had been able to obtain a considerable variety of religious sustenance in every case. The father and mother of Issachar were second cousins to each other, and showed the distinguishing family trait. Therefore, if it pleased Issa- char's father to attend a Baptist church during June, a Universalist in July, and a Sandemanian in August, Issachar's mother was similarly pleased. " There's good in 'em all, and we might as well get all the good that's goin'," Issa- char's great-grandfather had often remarked, and his descendants, one and all, had adopted this for their rule of life in the matter of church-going. They were always regular in their irregular attendance, for staying at home on Sundays was no clause in their creed ; but to attend one particular sanctuary year in and year out, or even to remain constant to one denomination, was something that no one of the tribe of Gadd 60 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT ever contemplated doing. Issachar's father and mother were New Yorkers ; and though they had been five years married at the time of his birth, they had not then in each other's company quite swept through the religious orbit of their native city. Like all of their kinsfolk, they were quite above and beyond the acknowledgment of preference for one form of faith above another. Protes- tant, Catholic, Mohammedan, Buddhist, they cared nothing for names like these, and would have entered a mosque or a Metho- dist meeting with equal readiness. Issachar was their only child, and as soon as it was practicable, or by the time he was three years old, he was taken by his parents on their religious rounds, and behaved himself as well as most children at an early age when church decorum is pressed upon them as a disagreeable duty. The Gadds were at this time revolving in a small circle of United Presbyterian churches; and young Issachar, finding the mode of worship practised here very little THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 6 1 to his taste, was moved to protest audibly, and for this was on two occasions removed by his mother with ignominious haste. It so happened that when the United Presby- terians had been disposed of by the Gadds they decided to attend a series of Episcopal churches ; and in the very first of these which they entered, the bishop of the dio- cese was holding a confirmation. Young Issachar, mounted upon a hassock between his parents, viewed the novel cere- mony with quiet approval, and the next afternoon was discovered by his mother and one of her friends in the act of standing before his family of dolls, ranged in one long row, and laying his pudgy hands upon their heads as he had seen the bishop place his upon the heads of the confirmation class the day before. " Well, of all things ! " cried his mother. " I should say as much ! " echoed the vis- itor. Indeed, she said more, for she added, impressively : " That child will be a bishop, Mrs. Gadd, as sure as you are born." 62 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT Most parents have at one time or another beheld their offspring " playing church," and have not deemed the action peculiarly sig- nificant; but Mrs. Gadd was much struck by her friend's prophecy, and, when the small Issachar temporarily suspended the confirmation rite in order to exclaim, joy- fully, " Yes, I'll be a bissup," she considered the child's destiny to be sealed from that moment. When Issachar's father returned that evening the important event of the day was related to him, and a family council held forthwith. Destiny, the Gadds com- prehended, was not to be eluded, and their plain duty was to make her path as straight as possible. "Of course," said Issachar's father, "we can't go and be Episcopals ourselves. We've got to keep our minds free from prejudices. But it's different about Issachar. We must send him to that Episcopal kindergarten in the next street, and when he is older he can go to St. Paul's at Concord. After that he can go to Trinity College and then to THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 63 the divinity school at Middletown, and when he's done with that they may make a bishop of him as soon as they damn please," con- cluded the paternal Gadd, with enthusiasm, and speaking with the vigour that he was wont to allow himself on important occa- sions. " Oh, hush, Robert ! " interposed Issa- char's mother. " A bishop's father ought not to swear. And besides, how do we know that Issachar is going to be an Epis- copal bishop ? You know there's Methodist bishops and Catholic bishops, and we heard a Moravian bishop once; and then don't you remember how last winter was a year we saw a bishop at the Greek church ? And I read of an Armenian bishop only yester- day. How do we know but Issachar is going to be one of these ? " " Well, he won't be a Methodist bishop, anyhow," said the future prelate's father, confidently, " because that kind never do any confirming." " But those other kinds do," replied his 64 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT wife, "and how can we tell that Issachar hasn't got to be one of them ? " Now the possibilities just evoked by Mrs. Gadd necessarily involved a great amount of thinking if they were to be properly con- sidered. If destiny intended to make of young Issachar a Latin, Greek, Moravian, or Armenian prelate, an entire reconstruc- tion of the programme so lately laid down as the path to the Anglican episcopate must follow ; and the paternal Gadd had not the smallest notion how Latin, Greek, Moravian or Armenian mitres were to be obtained. Now, surely, if he were about to smooth the path of destiny as well as he knew how, destiny ought to meet his efforts half way, and not be too strenuous in small matters. This was the substance, if not the exact form, of his rapid cogitations with himself ; and he was presently able to say with the ring of confidence in his voice : " Oh, pshaw, Mary ! you must see for yourself that he can't be one of those fellows. He'll have to be an Episcopal bishop, of THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 65 course. Why, it's as plain as anything can be in this world." " Well, if you feel so sure about it as all that, Robert," said Issachar's mother, " then it's quite right, of course." Destiny having thus been, as it were, gently taken by the shoulders and headed in the proper direction, young Issachar Gadd set forth on his progress to an episcopal throne. He was despatched the very next morning to the Episcopal kindergarten, and in. the charge of one of its teachers he was taken on Sundays to an Episcopal church, while his parents, in the laudable endeavour to keep their minds free from prejudices, continued on their denominational rounds. A few years went by, and then young Issa- char was sent to St. Paul's, where he re- mained till he was eighteen, and ready to enter college. As he emerged from boy- hood he ceased speaking to his companions about his intention to reach the episcopate before he died, though he had chattered much about it when he first went to Con- 66 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT cord, but this was not because his inten- tion had at all weakened. All his hopes were turned toward the goal of the episco- pate, and poor enough seemed all other stations in life compared to this. The end of his four years at Trinity College found him of this opinion still. From the window of his college room in Northam Towers he had gazed daily upon the bronze statue of Bishop Brownell on the college campus, and had secretly hoped that future years might see the statue of Bishop Issachar Gadd similarly adorning the grounds of his be- loved college. Young Issachar's taste in art was crude, and neither the extraordinary stiffness of the statue's pose nor its Ethio- pian blackness at all interfered with his admiring envy of the lot of the departed Connecticut prelate. He could have wished his own statue thus to stand with extended arm so long as bronze should endure. He was twenty-two when his college course was ended, and in the following autumn he entered the divinity school at THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 67 Middletown, as the paternal Gadd had decided a score of years previous. In the meantime Mrs. Gadd had died, in full con- fidence that her son would fulfil his destiny ; and her husband, equally confident that Issachar would one day wear the mitre, still continued his peculiar church-going habits, though he permitted himself to attend Episcopal churches oftenest on ac- count of his son's relations to that faith. Issachar's elevation had seemed very far away while the boy was in the kindergarten or at Saint Paul's, but now that his theologi- cal career was fairly begun, it appeared very near, by contrast, to the ambitious father. Issachar Gadd was not a brilliant youth, which perhaps was well for the fulfilment of his hopes ; but he had what are termed the solid qualities. He was amiable, sober- minded, and even-tempered. Originality he did not possess, and he preferred to walk always in well-beaten paths. His church- manship was not of an aggressive type, and he could not be definitely classed as either 68 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT high or low ; but as he grew older he would be characterised as an "eminently safe" clergyman, so those who knew him prophe- sied. Had it not been for what destiny had chosen him to become, he might have been considered as a young man of commonplace abilities and rather grave tastes, not wholly unspiritual, to be sure, but not markedly spiritual, either. And indeed that is just the estimate that his instructors and com- panions at the divinity school did form of him. But then the young man's destiny was veiled to their eyes, as indeed it was to all but those of Issachar and his father; for Mrs. Gadd's visitor who had first uttered the prophecy concerning him had died while the prospective prelate was still at the kindergarten. When he reached the age of twenty-six Issachar's studies in divinity at Middletown were completed and he had taken deacon's orders. Eighteen months later he entered the priesthood, and now the elder Gadd began to grow impatient. THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 69 " How long before they can make a bishop of you ? " he inquired of his son on one occasion. "Well," said the Reverend Issachar, "a man must be over thirty before he can be consecrated. I am not yet twenty-eight, and, besides, a man ought to have a good deal of clerical experience before he is fit to be a bishop." " That's damned nonsense ! " exclaimed his father with a burst of old-time vigour; and then, remembering that he was the father of a clergyman who would some day be much more than a mere clergyman, he added, hurriedly : " I mean, Issachar, you know, if you are to be a bishop you might as well be one first as last." The young priest smiled gravely as he replied : " You are in too great a hurry for my advancement, father. There are no vacant bishoprics at present, so -even if I were old enough for consecration there would be no chance for me now." At this the elder Gadd looked exceed- 70 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT ingly disconsolate, but brightened up as a thought occurred to him. " Well, when an old bishop dies they have to put some one in his place, don't they?" " To be sure." " Then if one dies by the time you are thirty you can get put in his place. That's simple enough, I am sure." The Reverend Issachar suffered his father to depart in this hopeful frame of mind ; but, on a subsequent occasion, explained to him how comparatively seldom a vacancy oc- curred in the House of Bishops, and that when a diocese needed a bishop the members of its convention elected one of several well- known clergymen whose names were brought before them, and that this election then had to be ratified by the standing committees of two-thirds of the dioceses in the American episcopate before the bishop-elect could be consecrated. Now as the elder Gadd had during all these years entertained very rudimentary THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 7 I ideas as to the making of bishops, he had ignorantly supposed his son's elevation to the episcopate might very soon follow the adoption of the clerical profession. Al- though he did not waver in his faith in the leadings of destiny, Issachar's summary of the further steps to be taken in order to reach the episcopal throne seemed to re- move his son's elevation to that same throne to a very remote period indeed. He grew somewhat melancholy over the postpone- ment of his hopes, began to wonder if he should see them realised, and presently, waxing indignant at the delay which was likely to ensue, resolved to attend the Episcopal church no more in the course of his transit through the ecclesiastical zodiac till the Reverend Issachar should become the Right Reverend. Years went by, and the eminent merits of the Reverend Issachar had not been appro- priately recognised by the Church when he had been canonically eligible for such recog- nition for a full lustrum. Presently his 72 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT fortieth birthday dawned, and he was only the Reverend Issachar yet. " I shall never live to see them make a bishop of you, damn 'em ! " exclaimed Robert Gadd, sorrowfully, on this anniversary. The Reverend Issachar forbore to rebuke this intemperate speech, and endeavoured to console his father; but without much suc- cess, for the elder Gadd, now a man of nearly seventy, had quite lost heart. His son, however, yet trusted in his star, so to speak, and performed his clerical duties in a most exemplary fashion. He had now been for ten years the rector of a flourishing parish in the diocese of Skowhegan, and was a delegate from it to the general convention. Once or twice the arrow of church pre- ferment had seemed to be aimed in his direction, but it had on each occasion glanced aside. An assistant bishop for the diocese had been chosen from among the clergy of his own town, and another clergyman of the neighbourhood had been elected bishop of a Western diocese. If his THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 73 life had depended upon it, the Reverend Issachar could not have given a good and sufficient reason why either of these men had been selected for promotion in prefer- ence to himself. To do him amplest justice, he did not in the least intend to be a digni- fied idler when he should have reached the episcopal chair. On the contrary, he knew that as a bishop his life would be even harder than as the busy rector of a large parish ; but he was quite willing to work harder if only he might fill that station in life for which destiny had intended him. Another full decade went by, and destiny appeared to have forgotten her original pur- pose concerning the Reverend Issachar. Meanwhile the scope of the American episcopate had become at least a third larger by the addition of new sees, while the number of bishops who had died and been succeeded by others was not small. The Reverend Issachar was still confident, but it was a much chastened confidence that he now possessed. Destiny, he had discov- 74 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT ered, did not mean to be hurried with refer- ence to his particular case. He was one day reading over to himself the epistle in the office for the consecration of bishops and commenting upon its provisions. How well he knew them all ! " A bishop must be blameless, the hus- band of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach ; not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous," and so on. Certainly he was no brawler, and he was not covetous, unless it was of a bishop's mitre, and the apostle himself had declared that it was good to desire a bishop's office. So far from being given to wine, he was a teetotaler; and vigilant in the performance of his duty he could safely say that he was. He was not blameless, no man might say that of himself, but he was as steadfast in the path of duty as he knew how to be, he told himself. " The husband of one wife," he next re- THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 75 peated to himself, slowly ; and then, as a new thought came to him, the prayer-book fell from his hand. He had always taken the apostle to mean that a bishop should have but one wife at a time, though why bishops only and not the inferior clergy also should be thus warned against bigamy had never been quite clear to him. Now it had suddenly dawned upon him that the apostle might also have intended to suggest the desirability of a bishop's being married. The Reverend Issachar had remained un- married all these years, and had never con- templated matrimony for himself as even a distant possibility. Perhaps it would be well to consider the matter, he now thought ; and if he were to marry, he mused, such an event ought to precede his elevation to the bench of bishops. Although a mere clergyman might permit himself the frivolousness of falling in love, wooing, and consequent marrying, it would never do for a bishop to engage in such a sequence. It would come hard upon him as a middle-aged 76 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT rector to go a-courting, but to do such a thing as a bishop would be utterly out of the question. A minister's wooing might be barely permissible, but a bishop's wooing would be simply scandalous. As it was, he hardly knew how to proceed in such a matter in a manner comporting with middle-aged clerical decorum ; but, if to this decorum were added that which doth perpetually hedge about the wearer of lawn sleeves, the task would be impossible. A bishop kneeling at a woman's feet, actually or figuratively, or writing love-letters, even, ought to be a human impossibility. A vague thought crossed his mind at this juncture that, had destiny intended him for the Roman episcopate, Saint Paul's advice as to being the husband of one wife would have gone for nothing ; but this sug- gestion he dismissed hurriedly and once more turned to consider his actual position. He must marry, and he must marry likewise before ^his assumption of the mitre should render such a step impossible. Then he THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 77 fell into so deep a reverie that his house- keeper was obliged to speak twice before she could make him comprehend that lunch- eon was served. The parish had long since taken it for granted that its rector would never marry ; and when, about a year after the Reverend Issachar's sudden enlightenment as to Saint Paul's meaning in regard to the marriage of bishops, its rector's marriage was an- nounced as having taken place during his summer holiday in a distant city, its surprise may be imagined. The event had come about naturally enough. The Rever- end Issachar had bethought him of a lady with whom he had had some acquaintance while he was studying divinity at Middle- town, and who, in the time intervening, had married and subsequently become a widow. The two had known something of each other's lives meanwhile ; and it was to this old acquaintance that the Reverend Issachar now turned in his perplexity. He was in middle life much better looking than in 78 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT youth, and some persons might have gone so far as to call him handsome. At any rate he was a very presentable, dignified kind of person; and when he made known to his old acquaintance, Mrs. Boardman, his desire to make her Mrs. Gadd, she turned a very favourable ear to his request. The en- gagement was not a very long one, and the Reverend Issachar could not have been called an ardent lover, exactly; but, if he had not fallen in love with Mrs. Boardman, he sincerely admired her and felt she would make him a good wife. And what more would you have ? We are not all of us sentimentalists. Mrs. Boardman was ap- parently satisfied. She was not an exacting person, and she had plans of her own. When the Reverend Issachar returned home, bringing Mrs. Gadd with him, the parish, finding the rector's wife to be a stout, personable dame, of very suitable age, was disposed to think he had done wisely ; though in some quarters it was urged that if he needs must marry he need not have THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 79 gone nearly so far afield. The rector's wife was a stirring, ambitious person, by no means disposed to sit with hands folded and await the coming of events; and so, after being elected to the headship of a half dozen or more feminine associations in the parish, she began to stir things up on her husband's behalf. " Issachar," she observed at the breakfast- table one morning, " there's no good reason why you should not be a bishop, none in the world." The rector fully agreed with his wife on this point, but felt it incumbent upon him to utter a half inaudible protest. " Nonsense ! " said Mrs. Gadd, with much vigour. " You are just the kind of man to fill a bishop's throne. To be sure, you are not brilliant, but that's entirely to your ad- vantage so far as securing a bishopric is concerned. You are a moderate man who wouldn't make enemies, and that's the ma- terial a bishop should be made of. And you are very good-looking " (another half 8o THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT inaudible protest from the rector), " and that ought to help you. You would be in your true place at the head of a diocese, and I mean to see that you get there, Issachar," concluded Mrs. Gadd, with much decision in her tone. The Reverend Issachar smiled gravely, but did not reply. The issue of events seemed certain enough now that destiny and Mrs. Gadd had joined their forces in his behalf. Destiny had been dilatory hitherto, but his experience of Mrs. Gadd up to the present had shown him most conclusively that she was not at all a dila- tory female. Now Mrs. Gadd, whose first husband had been senior warden of a large city church, had a wide acquaintance among the clergy, especially in the diocese of Lancaster where she had lived as Mrs. Boardman; and, as it chanced, the bishop of that diocese died not far from this time and but a month or two before the meeting of the diocesan convention. Keeping this THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 8 1 event uppermost in her mind, she made it convenient to visit her former home; and, without directly mentioning her husband's name in connection with the vacant bishop- ric, did manage to convey in many quarters a very distinct impression of the sterling vir- tues of her second husband, the Reverend Issachar Gadd. " Your husband has a very flourishing parish, I hear, Mrs. Gadd," the secretary of the convention remarked to her on one occasion when calling upon her. "Yes, it is a large parish, indeed," was the reply, " and very devoted he is to it ; and the people, too, are very fond of him. You see he has been rector there over twenty years, and he has the most intimate knowledge of individual needs. Then it takes remarkable executive abilities to man- age a large parish successfully, you know, Mr. Leavenworth ; and, even if every one did not tell me so, I could see for myself how admirably matters are carried on in his parish. But you must tell me about Mrs. 82 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT Leavenworth and the children, whom I shall hope to see soon " and thus the wife of the Reverend Issachar easily led the conversa- tion into other channels. She was always willing to talk of her husband and his happy united parish, but she never introduced these topics into the conversation and never prolonged their discussion beyond the patience of her listeners. She had not been a prominent figure in society for a score of years without having her perceptions rendered properly acute. She had been a popular woman in her former home, and was now made much of by her friends on the occasion of her first visit to them since her marriage ; and, meet- ing at receptions and dinners many influen- tial members of the convention, clerical and lay, her husband and his affairs were very naturally alluded to by those who spoke with her. " I hoped we should have seen your hus- band also at this time, Mrs. Gadd," the regis- trar of the diocese observed one day as he THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 83 took her in to dinner at the house of the friend with whom she was then staying. " Well, you know, Mr. Harwood, he finds it very difficult to get away from his parish, even for a short time." " It is a large parish, then, I conclude." " Oh yes, very, and he is very faithful to his people and they are much attached to him. Some of his people have told me that in all the years he has been there over twenty now there has never been the shadow of a quarrel between persons of opposite views; and yet he has both high and low churchmen in his parish, and even some broad churchmen, also." Mrs. Gadd's neighbour on the left as they sat at dinner had some polite questions to ask about the Reverend Issachar, adding as he did so : " I overheard part of what you were saying to Mr. Harwood about your husband's parish. Mr. Gadd must have great tact, I think, to be able to harmonise such discordant ele- ments. It isn't every clergyman who is 84 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT gifted in that direction, and I have heard it whispered that bishops are sometimes lack- ing in that particular " and as he turned with a smile to answer some remark of the hostess at that moment Mr. Harwood took up the theme. " I almost wonder that other parishes have not tried to tempt your husband away from his present charge, Mrs. Gadd." " Oh, they have, numberless times" (a wifely exaggeration of the facts, for the Reverend Issachar had had but two calls to other fields), " but he has preferred to remain where he is, though I cannot help the feeling that change would do him good and that his abilities would abundantly fit him for a wider sphere of activity." Just how the movement started no one could have told, but it was not very long before the wish that Mrs. Gadd might be with her old friends permanently had merged into the question, " Now can't we get her back again ? " and at this juncture the name of the Reverend Issachar began to be mentioned THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 85 as that of a candidate for the vacant throne. The diocese of Lancaster was one which the late episcopal head had not ruled over well, for the two great parties in the Church had been pretty evenly represented within it, and the departed prelate, whose proclivi- ties were strongly low church, had therefore been cordially disliked by the high church- men. The latter were fully determined that no pronounced low churchman should suc- ceed the late incumbent, and their oppo- nents were equally resolved that no advanced churchman should do so, either ; and unless the two parties could unite on some mod- erate candidate for the office a long wrangle was likely to result. Thus it happened that the Reverend Issachar's record began to be looked into after his wife's remarks in refer- ence to him had stimulated interest in that quarter, and so far as could be seen he had never ranged himself on either side in the discussion between high and low, while no one could possibly call him latitudina- rian, an attitude abhorrent to both par- 86 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT ties. " He would be a very safe man for us," was the general conclusion regarding him. Matters had reached this hopeful stage when the diocesan convention assembled, and when other business matters had been disposed of the names of several candidates for the office of bishop of the diocese were placed before it, among them that of the Rev- erend Issachar Gadd, presbyter of the diocese of Skowhegan. The balloting did not take long, and, owing to the anxiety of each party to secure a bishop who would not be the mouthpiece of the other, the result was that the name of the Skowhegan presbyter, like Abou-Ben-Adhem's, led all the rest. There was little doubt in the minds of those who had voted for the Reverend Issachar but that their choice would be ratified by the stand- ing committees of other dioceses, and as a matter of fact such ratification followed speedily. Great things were not expected of the Bishop-elect of Lancaster, but every- body was satisfied. The wife of the bishop- THE EVOLUTION OF A BISHOP 87 elect was more than satisfied, indeed, she was quietly exultant; and as for the Reverend Issachar, he felt that destiny, though she had hitherto moved in a mysterious way, had now, with the cooperation of Mrs. Gadd, made up her mind to do the hand- some thing by him, and he was properly grateful to both powers. A few months later his consecration took place, the day selected being the fiftieth anniversary of the prophecy in relation to this same event. It had been a long run- ning, but the goal was won at last. The father of the new bishop, now in his eight- ieth year, was present at the fulfilment of the prophecy, in what might be called a nunc dimittis state of mind. From this time onward he attended only the Episcopal church, feeling that he was too old now to acquire denominational prejudices by so doing, and was never so happy as when he beheld the Right Reverend Issachar holding a confirmation. But he had lost faith in destiny long years before, and did not believe 88 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT that destiny had helped on the great event in the least. Mrs. Gadd was large-minded. She never at any time in the presence of her right rev- erend consort reverted to the fact that she had obliged his destiny to exchange an andante for an allegro movement toward the goal aimed at; but nevertheless that was just what she had accomplished, and she knew it, and in secret took no little pride in the fact, as well she might. If this were her state of mind after her husband had appeared in lawn sleeves, and, figuratively speaking, had felt the mitre on his brows, what must have been the inward felicity of that patient good man himself when for the first time he was able to affix his signature to his official communications in correct ca- nonical fashion, " Issachar, Lancaster " ? WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH THE Bishop of Superior was spending his fourth summer at Rye. He said that its climate agreed with him, and that he never felt the hot weather so little as when there. But they made much of the bishop at Rye, and perhaps that influenced slightly the good man's opinion of the climate, for even a bishop cannot always remain insen- sible to the voice of the charmer. I have said that they made much of the bishop at Rye, but that phrase is to be understood in a highly figurative sense, for the diocesan of Superior was a small man, and not even stretching upon the rack could have made much of him. He might magnify his office, and truth compels me to say that 91 92 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT he did so, in the language of the profane, for all that it was worth, but he could not magnify himself. His stature, or his want of it rather, was a source of great disquiet to him. Although as a Biblical scholar he was presumably aware that he could not by taking thought add one cubit to his stature, he thought a great deal about the matter all the same. His cross, for such this had come to seem to him, was comparatively easy to bear when he was not in the company of his brethren of the episcopate, but at the triennial conventions and wherever else the bishops might be gathered together, the fact of his physical insignificance bore heavily upon him. On one occasion he returned from a Church Congress in such an irritable frame of mind that his wife mildly remon- strated. The bishop turned upon her at once. " My dear," he said, almost fiercely, " you know nothing at all about it. If you had sat as I have done for three mortal hours with the Bishop of Silverado on one side and the Bishop of Quinnecticut on the WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 93 other, the two men towering above your head like the spires of Cologne Cathedral, you would be as full of indignation as I am at the infernal idiots who planned to make you ridiculous by assigning you to such a position. I haven't one bit of doubt but that those two were smiling over my head at the figure I must have cut," continued the aggrieved bishop. " Why I was ever nomi- nated for the diocese of Superior, the largest bishopric in the whole American Church, unless it was to emphasise the contrast between the size of the diocese and the want of size of its bishop, I am sure I don't know. I should have been much better adapted to the diocese of Eleware." " Perhaps you would have been," answered his wife, calmly, "but you know that that diocese has not been vacant for nearly fifty years, and had there been a vacancy and had you been elected to fill it, you would have said that because you were a small man people must fancy you were only fit for the smallest diocese." 94 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT " Well, I have no doubt I should have said just those words," said the bishop, frankly. His wrath had subsided, and he could afford to be candid, especially with his wife, who knew him so well that no other attitude on his part could be tenable for long. At Rye, however, the bishop was unique. That place had come to be so generally recognised as the summer diocese, so to speak, of the Bishop of Superior, that not even the bishop in whose spiritual preserves it was situated intruded his presence from July to October. For those three months the Bishop of Superior reigned there alone. True, he reigned alone in his own dominions as well, but a missionary diocese is a very different thing from a seaside resort in the summer ; and, after enduring for nine months of every year all the ills that a missionary bishop is heir to, he felt himself entitled to whatever of worthy consolation was to be found at Rye. And without question he was popular there, and whenever it was known that he WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 95 was to preach at the Church of St. Andrew's- by-the-Sea, which he did not do every Sun- day by any means, the pretty little building was uncomfortably crowded. He was a good preacher, with rather broad church views, and, apart from a certain kind of vanity which seems as unavoidable an accessory of the episcopate as the lawn sleeves them- selves, was a very agreeable man to meet. His presence conferred a kind of distinction on the hotel where he stayed, a distinction which could be reckoned in dollars and cents, as the proprietor had discovered. People liked to be able, when writing to their friends, to add : " The Bishop of Su- perior always spends his summers at the Crichton, where we are. He and his wife are here now, and sit at the table next to ours." Other people who had been undecided where to go for the summer sometimes, after reading such an item in a friend's letter, were thereby helped on to a decision, and telegraphed to Rye for rooms at the Crichton. 96 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT Regarding the success of the Bishop of Superior in his own diocese, I know but little. It is to be presumed, however, that his experience did not differ materially from that of other missionary bishops, and that it included many discomforts during the course of his visitations through a thinly settled country, discomforts which he was quite willing to forget for a time whenever he found himself feeding on the roses and lying among the lilies of Rye. And for this he could not reasonably be blamed. But at no time of the summer was the life at Rye wildly gay, and the bishop could smile upon the whole of it, therefore, with- out any straining of the episcopal con- science. Strolls along the beach to Straw's Point northward, and along the cliff to Little Boar's Head southward, or about the village ; drives to Exeter, Hampton, Portsmouth, or Newcastle ; excursions to the Isles of Shoals ; tennis ; an occasional german, these made up the greater part of it, and, with the excep- tion of the german, it included nothing in WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 97 which a bishop might not, with perfect pro- priety, engage. He could now and then be prevailed upon to play tennis in the morn- ing, or a few games in the bowling-alley, and he frequently looked in at the billiard- room. For these reasons he was popular with the young people, while his ecclesiasti- cal dignity, well blended with a most cordial style of address, made him liked by the elders. Yet the episcopal ruler of Superior never for a moment forgot that he was a bishop. Even on the tennis-court or at the bowling- alley he remembered the fact, and endeav- oured (in default of any special rubrics upon such matters), to serve the balls as a bishop should serve them, or make a strike in the manner it became a bishop to do. It was not possible that such firm convictions as to the dignity of his calling which the bishop held could altogether escape the notice of those about him, but people were very far from objecting to any magnifying of his ofHce in which the Bishop of Superior might 98 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT indulge. Indeed, the members of his own household of faith would not have been satisfied had he appeared to forget or put aside any part of his lawful dignity, and those of other communions had, neverthe- less, a certain reverence for the high offices of episcopacy, and would not have taken kindly to a bishop who seemed to think no more highly of himself than if he were an ordinary minister. So the Bishop of Superior, finding his sway undisputed at Rye, felt that his lines had fallen in pleasant places. He was quite willing to unbend and be as other men, so far as such unbending was consistent with the episcopal character, but he was, neverthe- less, properly pleased to have his dignity ac- knowledged in the course of that unbending. After this manner he had reigned for three seasons at Rye, and after this manner he hoped to reign there for many succeeding summers. But bishops are sometimes thrown out of their orbits, as are lesser stars in the firmament ecclesiastical, and it was during WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 99 the bishop's fourth summer at the beach that certain events took place which caused him no little perturbation of spirit. The week after his coming for the fourth time, it was rumoured that the Bishop of Cheyenne was coming to Rye also, and treading closely on the heels of this report came the Bishop of Cheyenne himself. That he was a great contrast to the courtly Bishop of Superior every one saw at the first glance. He was tall, with a full beard, which left little of his face uncovered, and his clothes, as some one suggested, looked as if they had been put on in the teeth of a furious gale, so negligent and haphazard was their appearance. Their cut was ecclesiastical, it was true, but their aspect was defiantly secular. The reigning bishop was not overpleased at the advent of his brother of the episcopal bench, but nothing of this was evident in the cordial welcome he gave to the Bishop of Cheyenne, and the newcomer had not the smallest suspicion that he was regarded as 100 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT a rival by the little man before him. As a matter of fact, the claims of the Bishop of Superior were too firmly grounded to be seriously imperilled by this almost unknown bishop from the far West, who flung every- thing like episcopal dignity to the winds, and whose rough, burly manners did not prove attractive to the people at Rye. St. Andrew's-by-the-Sea was full of people, to be sure, on the Sunday when he held service there, but then a bishop, no matter how gauche his appearance might be, was still a bishop, and entitled to one hearing at least. But his individuality was no more pleasing in the chancel than out of it, and his occa- sional lapses from grammatical propriety received their full meed of sarcastic com- ment from his hearers. Some of these comments reached the ears of the other bishop at times. Now if there was one essential of his sermons upon which the Bishop of Superior prided himself more than another, it was on the accuracy of his sen- tences, and in this respect he certainly had WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH IOI a great advantage over the careless diocesan of Cheyenne. " I heard the Bishop of Cheyenne say this morning that he ' done a good bit of travel- ling last year,' " observed Janet Clarke in the hearing of the Bishop of Superior one day. " I wonder what grammar, if any, is used in Cheyenne," she added. " You forget, Miss Clarke," said the Bishop of Superior, in a tone of very gentle reproval, " that Cheyenne is a very rough country. Perhaps we ought not to be surprised if the few people of education there should insen- sibly adopt the speech of those about them." " I am sure it is very charitable of you, bishop, to put it in that way," observed Reginald Smith, who was one of the group of young people around the bishop, "but I have heard him say worse things than that. Not half an hour ago I heard him remark in the smoking-room that he was rather tired of this place, and he believed that he should 'light out' in a day or two. What do you say to that?" 102 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT The bishop smiled, but forbore comment, and De Lancy Greene coming up just then for Reginald to join him in a drive to Hampton, no answer was needed. It was very evident that the newcomer had done nothing to disturb the sway of the Bishop of Superior, and that good man felt disposed to be very charitable in his judg- ments of the half-tamed bishop from the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. A glow of satisfaction came over his cheeks as he took his regular evening walk toward Little Boar's Head and thought of his own popularity at Rye, which nothing was likely soon to affect, he fancied. And that was all he knew about it. A day or two later, as Reginald Smith and the bishop were sitting on the hotel veranda, watching a game of tennis between Janet Clarke and De Lancy Greene, Reginald sud- denly asked : " By the way, do you know anything of the Lord Bishop of Boothia Felix ? " His companion could not wholly repress WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 10$ a little shiver, as of one who detects a subtle atmospheric change, but he replied, calmly enough : " I know, of course, that there is such a bishopric, but I don't remember just now who fills it. But whoever it be, he is not a lord bishop, because only prelates having seats in the House of Lords have that title, I believe." " Well," said Reginald, " I was over at the Shoals yesterday, and they told me at the Appledore House that the Lord Bishop of Boothia Felix was to be there in a day or two. I thought after he arrived you might like to go over and call upon him, and, if so, De Lancy and I will take you across any day that will suit you. I supposed that was his proper title," added the speaker, " because I had fancied all Anglican bishops were lords." " It is a mistake constantly made," began the other; "but about your offer. It is very good of you to make it and I will let you know soon what day will suit me best IO4 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT to go," thinking as he spoke that at no time would it exactly suit him to make such a call, although it would have to be made, nevertheless. For now it will be surmised the Bishop of Superior scented danger from afar. The lord bishop, as people persisted in speaking of him, persevered in his intention of going to Appledore, and the dwellers at the Shoals rejoiced greatly over his presence, but the Bishop of Superior did not go there at once to pay his respects to the spiritual governor of Boothia Felix. For one reason Reginald Smith was summoned to Boston on business, the morning after the sailboat excursion had been given, and doubtless the other reasons the bishop had for delay were equally cogent. But a goodly number of the people at the Crichton went to the Shoals in the course of the following week, and re- turned full of praises of the Lord Bishop of Boothia Felix. " I am thankful he is no nearer than Appledore," said the Bishop of Superior to WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH IO5 his wife on one occasion. " It is tiresome enough as it is, to hear him so constantly quoted, but it would be unendurable if he were here beside us." " I was rather wishing that he would come for a little while," the other replied, some- what provokingly. " I have always thought that I should like to meet a lord bishop." " But I tell you he's not a lord bishop," said her husband, with irritation, and for the twentieth time, as it seemed to him, he ex- plained why the Bishop of Boothia Felix, be- ing only a colonial prelate, was not entitled to be called a lord. " I never pretend to understand all these little details about the English Church," said the bishop's wife, placidly, when he con- cluded, and that was all that his lengthy explanation accomplished. " They say," said De Lancy Greene to the bishop the next morning, " that the people at the Wentworth in Newcastle are quite wild to have the Lord Bishop of Boothia Felix over there." io6 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT " They are wholly welcome to him," was what the other wanted to say, but he made some pleasant reply to De Lancy, who was very far from suspecting what was in the bishop's mind. That morning the bishop sat by himself in the shade of some bushes on the seashore for a long time, in a very quiet, contempla- tive mood. The Churchman had dropped from his hand to the ground unheeded. The soft noise of the waves upon the sand, the light breeze blowing, and the sight of the calm surface of the sea in front of him, had lulled him into peace with all mankind, including intrusive bishops. Even the sight of the Isles of Shoals, which seemed to hover on the water a few miles distant, did not serve to remind him of his rival who dwelt there. He counted them, as he never could keep from doing whenever he looked in their direction on a clear day. White Island, with its lighthouse, stood out bold and clear in the sunshine. Putting up his glass, he could see the low length of Londoner's Island in WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH IO7 front of the group, and imagine that he saw Square Rock beside it. But it was only his imagination. Even an archbishop would not have been able to discern it at that dis- tance. But Star Island, with its hotel and other houses, was plain enough, and beyond it Smutty Nose, Malaga, and Cedar Islands blended their low outlines into one. Apple- dore rose up blackly against the horizon, and the houses upon it seemed close at hand when he looked at them through his glass. Duck Island showed its black jagged rocks a little to the north of Appledore, the last of the group. When the bishop had leisurely counted the islands, and ascertained their number to be exactly the same as on the night before, he carried his glass still farther to the northwest and saw, long miles away, the gray shaft of the Boon Island lighthouse rising from the sea. Then he put down the glass, only to raise it a moment after to watch through it the shoreward progress of the steamer from Appledore to Portsmouth. The smoke from its pipe drifted away on io8 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT the faint breeze and lay like a small cloud against the horizon. A very tiny cloud it was, but if the bishop could have looked into the future he would have recognised in this small cloud the beginnings of one which should overspread his whole firmament. For the Bishop of Boothia Felix was on board the steamer at that very moment ! But this the other bishop happily did not know, and so with his episcopal serenity undisturbed he rose presently and returned to the hotel in time for an early lunch, so that he and his wife could join the Kirklands, an elderly couple who greatly admired the spiritual master of Rye, in a drive to Exeter in the afternoon in accordance with the invitation given by Mr. Kirkland at breakfast. And so, all unsuspicious of what might be in store for him, the bishop went on his drive as serene and dignified as a bishop ought always to be. It was nearly the dinner- hour when the four returned, and when the bishop and his wife were seated at their table they were soon joined by Reginald WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH IOQ Smith, who had arrived from Boston in their absence. " By the way, bishop," said Reginald, after greetings had been exchanged, " who do you suppose has been here this afternoon ? " Just at that moment the waiter approached with a card on his salver. " This was left for you this afternoon," said the waiter, " and the clerk omitted to send it up to your room at the time." " This answers your question," said the bishop, as he read from the card the name of the Bishop of Boothia Felix. He spoke with far more calmness than he felt. " Yes, it does,"" said Reginald. " He was delighted when he heard you were here ; and, by the way, I'm awfully sorry it happened that I could not take you to the Shoals as I promised. However, it does not so much matter in one way because, after he ascer- tained you were here, he decided to leave the Shoals, and is coming to stay at the Crichton next week." " Heaven forbid," thought Reginald's lis- 1 10 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT tener, which was rather ungrateful, consider- ing that the coming prelate had expressed so much interest in him. " Capital thing, isn't it ? " Reginald went on. " He'll be no end of company for you, and I fancy that after he comes we poor lay- men will be at a great discount in your eyes. I assure you he's not a bit like that Cheyenne duffer." " I wish he were," thought the bishop to himself. " But you mustn't let him absorb you com- pletely," added Reginald. " Remember that we have some claim upon you." In the nature of things it was impossible for the young man to know how little desir- ous the Bishop of Superior was of being thus absorbed by him of Boothia Felix, or how little real pleasure he took in the soci- ety of his episcopal brethren. Not being a bishop, Reginald could not from his own experience be aware that the importance of a bishop decreases as the square of his number increases. A unicorn and a bishop WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH I I I are equally interesting for their rarity. A bishop, like a unicorn, becomes the centre of admiration only when there is but one of him. When there are two of him the admi- ration is proportionately diminished or is transferred almost entirely to the better specimen. Of all this the Bishop of Superior was very fully aware and he would have been devoutly thankful if, considering that Hea- ven was not likely to hinder the approach of the Bishop of Boothia Felix, the latter individ- ual had been the counterpart of the member of the episcopate whom Reginald Smith had irreverently called "the Cheyenne duffer." A few days yet were left to him before the Anglican prelate would leave Appledore in quest of his society, and of those he made the most. Never had the young people seen him more gracious and benignant toward them ; never had their elders found him more companionable and agreeable than now; but only the bishop's wife knew the real reason for this access of cordiality on 112 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT the part of her husband. That worthy woman having enjoyed the felicity of his companionship for over thirty years, was too well used to his habits of procedure to be long at a loss to account for any of his .movements. And the bishop knew very well that his wife read him as easily as he could read the title of The Churchman on its cover; but he knew also that she read him to herself and not to the outside world, and he was not disturbed. She was seldom aggressively critical, he had dis- covered. The Bishop of Superior was not wanting in social tact, and he perceived very clearly that, since the advent of his Anglican brother of the episcopate was inevitable, he must at least present a smiling front. Ac- cordingly, accompanied by his wife, he called upon the Bishop of Boothia Felix at Apple- dore, and on the day when the latter was to leave the Shoals he went to Portsmouth to accompany him the rest of the way to Rye. Simple enough as all this sounds, it WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 113 was by no means an easy business for the Bishop of Superior. On meeting the An- glican at Appledore the diocesan of Superior discovered, to his horror, that the other bishop was a much larger man than even " the Cheyenne duffer," and the discovery for a moment almost rendered him speechless. To make matters worse, he perceived traces of corresponding surprise in the face of the tall man looking down upon him, and he knew or thought he knew that he was pre- senting much the same appearance to the Bishop of Boothia Felix as if he were being viewed through the wrong end of a spyglass. He rallied his forces, however, and exerted all his powers to please, while his wife, who knew what he was suffering, saw and secretly ad- mired her husband. This, to be sure, the object of the admiration could not know, and, even if he had known, it would have yielded him very little comfort. " Why couldn't the man have stayed in his Boothia Felix and not have come down where he is not wanted, merely to make the I 14 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT region an infelix to me ? " he was saying to himself while aloud he uttered the most civil of phrases. Not that he meant to be insincere. He was not consciously so. He did not person- ally dislike the large man before him ; it was only his bulk that was objectionable. A bishop of the average figure he felt able to hold his own with, although he liked best to have no stars of episcopal magnitude near him for any length of time, preferring the society of clergy of rank inferior to his own ; but when bishops of such gigantic propor- tions as those of the one from Boothia Felix came to be considered, he was dis- posed to think that the craft and subtlety of the devil must have been exercised in bringing him into close relations with such a prelate. And close relations he foresaw they must sustain while in the same hotel. As he pondered the matter on his return to Rye he almost resolved on flight. And yet flight was not easy. " How should you fancy passing the rest WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 115 of the summer at Campobello, my dear ? " he said to his wife, tentatively. " What, with our rooms taken at the Crichton till October and all our plans made to remain ? What are you thinking of to propose it, Augustus ? " (By that lofty name had the bishop been christened, and certain reckless sheep of his flock were used to allude to him as Bishop Gus.) " It never would do in the world," was added, with decision. She knew very well of what her husband was thinking and she could not forbear letting him see that she knew. " I saw by this week's Churchman that the Lord Bishop of Fredericton was ex- pected at Campobello in a day or two. Did you want to meet him ? " she asked, sharply. But the poor little dignitary said no more. Certainly he did not mean to fly from the presence of this bishop to that of the then Metropolitan of Canada. No, he must abide his fate at Rye. And there he had the advantage of being on his own ground, n6 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT and he took to himself a little courage from that fact; but not much, and when he fell asleep that night it was only to dream of attending the coming General Convention of the Church and presenting a bill for the consideration of the House of Bishops regard- ing the size of its members. The bill pro- vided that when any person after his elevation to the episcopate exceeded a prescribed cir- cumference he was to be deposed from his office, and also that no person above five feet six inches in height should be eligible to the office of bishop. When he recalled his dream in the morning the bill did not seem such a feasible one as it had done in the night watches, and he felt that the House of Bishops would hardly receive its proposi- tions with due consideration. He did, how- ever, sit down at his desk to write a paper for the American Church Review viifa. the attrac- tive heading, " Ought Brains or Bulk to Gov- ern in the Choice of a Bishop ? " He was not suffered to advance much beyond the title, however, for his wife, judging from the ex- WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH I 17 pression of his features that he meditated the speeding of some deadly arrow, came and looked over his shoulder. " Gus ! " she said, severely. Now the bishop hated diminutives, not unnaturally, and most of all he disliked the familiar diminutive of his own name. His wife knew this very well, and consequently never addressed him as Gus except as a pre- lude to expressions of strong disapproval. Therefore when she said " Gus " in her severest, iciest manner, the bishop almost jumped from his chair. " Gus," she repeated, " unless you wish to be the laughing-stock of the whole episcopal bench, and of every one who knows you, in fact, you will not publish anything like what you have begun to write." " I needn't put my name to it," feebly remonstrated the harassed bishop. " Your style is too well known to be dis- guised," was the response to this. " People would be sure to suspect you of writing such a thing." u8 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT The bishop made no audible reply, but he tore the half-filled sheet into small pieces, threw them into the waste-basket, and then his wife returned to her fancy work satisfied. As was stated before, the Bishop of Superior went to Portsmouth to meet the newcomer on the day the latter was to ar- rive at Rye, and after a lunch at the Rock- ingham House the coach for Rye called for them. " That is something like, now," observed the Anglican as they came down the hotel steps. " It will be fine riding on those top seats." On hearing this, the Bishop of Superior could only gasp in reply : " But it will be very dusty up there." " Not a bit of it," returned the other in his big, lusty voice. " Driver," he called to that personage, " it will not be dusty to-day, will it ? so soon after the rajn ? " On receiving the required assurance, the Anglican prelate, with far more agility than one would have expected him to show, swung WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH I 19 himself up to the coach roof and perched himself on the loftiest seat, " like Pelion upon Ossa," as the other bishop could not help saying to himself. Now the Bishop of Superior had never climbed to such dizzy heights in the sight of any of the people at Rye, whatever he may have been forced by circumstances to do in his own diocese, and he didn't at all like the prospect before him. Courtesy, nevertheless, demanded that he should follow the lead of his episcopal brother, and so, after vigorous pushings from the driver, supplemented by an equally vigorous hauling upward by the Bishop of Boothia Felix, the little man reached the elevated tableland and was seated beside his companion, too much blown by the exertion to speak for a time. Perhaps this was for- tunate, because, could he have done so, he might not have spoken the truth in that love which bishops are always expected to have at command. With returning breath suavity resumed her sway, and he was able to re- ply to the other's remarks with a great 120 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT deal more calmness than he really could feel. It was not an agreeable position for the Bishop of Superior, and he was by no means sure that it was a safe one either, though for that he cared less. But to dash through Portsmouth streets and along the road to Rye at an elevation of fifteen feet or more from the ground, at the side of a man five times as big as himself, was no light trial for the small bishop. He was convinced that every one who should see the two perched up there on a level with the second-story windows would remark the contrast between them, in which conjecture he was not far wrong. But the Anglican was superbly indifferent to all such considerations, and when the bugler blew his blast from the rumble and the horses started off briskly he was in high spirits, which not even the ne- cessity of constantly dodging the branches all along the avenue leading to the South Cemetery could at all dissipate. How the lesser bishop survived that, as it seemed to WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 121 him, perilous drive he could never clearly tell, and during the whole of it his mind was too much occupied with thoughts of his ap- pearance in such a position, with such a companion and with the necessity of hold- ing on firmly in order to retain his seat as the coach went flying over the road, to allow him to return any but the vaguest replies to the remarks of his brother prelate. Several times indeed, at the more violent lurches of the vehicle, he clutched wildly at the arm of that reverend gentleman, who gave an in- ward chuckle each time as he said to him- self, " Evidently this is new business for the little American." The ride was not endless, however, but as they drew up before the Crichton and saw the array of guests assembled on the veranda, the Bishop of Superior could almost have wished it had been if the present awful moment could thereby have been averted. There was his wife in the foreground, but that did not trouble him. Close beside her, however, were Janet Clarke and De Lancy 122 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT Greene, and behind them were Reginald Smith and the Kirklands, while the rest of the people he knew were there by dozens. The Bishop of Boothia Felix, waving aside the assistance of the driver, sprang lightly down from the coach to the veranda floor and then turned to assist his companion. " Come, bishop," he said, and then, to his unspeakable horror, the helpless and hap- less bishop felt himself seized by the long arms of the Anglican and gently but swiftly soaring through the air in a long curve to the veranda floor and set upon his aston- ished feet. Never to his knowledge had a bishop been subjected to such treatment before, and his feelings on the occasion could only be compared to those of the king of the Red Chessmen, when Alice in Wonderland lifted him from the floor to the table. The bishop was familiar with this historic event, and he wondered if any thought of the likeness between himself and the Red King occurred to any of the pres- ent spectators. In point of fact, De Lancy WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 123 Greene was just then whispering that very thing to Janet Clarke. The wife of the Bishop of Superior at that moment sincerely pitied her husband, for she well knew what must be the state of his mind, and she was not surprised to hear him excuse himself to the Anglican on the plea of fatigue, promising to meet him at dinner an hour or two later. When she could do so she followed her husband, and found him walking up and down their pri- vate parlour in a high state of excitement. " My dear," he almost shouted as she entered, " did you see how I was treated ? " His wife murmured a not very intelligible reply. She could not in truth say no, and it was not pleasant to have to say yes, and therefore she sought refuge in disconnected syllables. But it mattered little, for the bishop was too full of wrath to heed. " Of course you saw it. You must have seen it," he went on with gathering ire. " Confound the Bishop of Boothia Felix ! " and the mild oath had in his lips all the fervour of a much 124 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT stronger one. " I wish the Bishop of Boothia Felix was in ' " Augustus ! " interposed the bishop's wife rather sternly. She had sympathised up to that point, but even of- fended episcopal dignitaries ought not to exceed certain limits of expression, she rightly felt. The bishop, thus admonished, broke off his sentence in mid-air and left the desired locale of the Anglican an in- ferential possibility, contenting himself with adding : " I never can be civil to that man again, never ! " To this his wife made no response. She knew her husband, and so it occasioned her no surprise to behold him an hour later talking to the spiritual pastor of Boothia Felix across the dinner-table as if he had only the most amiable of feelings toward that ecclesiastic. But really no other course was open to the Bishop of Superior. In a certain sense the intruder, for such he con- sidered the newcomer, was his guest, and he was bound in honour to accord him the civil- ities his station demanded. There was no WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 125 room for the play of indignant or resentful feelings. And the Bishop of Superior knew also that, however well resentment may be- come a large man whose dignity has been ruffled, it is merely food for the laughter of gods and men when indulged in by a small man, and thus there was even an extra touch of courtesy in his manner when he met the Anglican at dinner. As for the Bishop of Boothia Felix, he had not the smallest notion that his com- pany was not highly enjoyed by the dio- cesan of Superior, and he very generously bestowed much of it upon him. On hotel verandas, on the strolls to Little Boar's Head, or in the rambles about Rye, the lesser bishop was now never seen without the greater one by his side. The only place where the Bishop of Superior felt secure was in his own private parlour, but of course he could not shut himself up there constantly. The new arrival naturally received many courtesies from the people at the hotel, but in all invitations requesting his company in 126 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT drives and excursions the Bishop of Superior was included in a similar invitation, and the latter felt it incumbent upon him to accept. Indeed, .whenever he received a verbal invi- tation the Bishop of Boothia Felix would always reply, in his hearty, good-humoured manner : " I shall be delighted to accept it if my little friend here is to be one of the party. I could not think of going without him." Little friend indeed ! Truly the lot of the Bishop of Superior was just now a very hard one. So it came to be understood that the major bishop and the minor bishop were always to be asked together. And all this was as gall and wormwood to the minor bishop. But he was quite beyond the reach of human help, and he hardly liked to appeal to divine as- sistance to rid him from the embrace of this episcopal Old Man of the Sea whom he, like an ecclesiastical Sindbad, was doomed to carry about with him. His wife beheld WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 12"J him smiling bravely beneath his burden, but was powerless to assist. Reginald Smith, the only person besides his wife in whom the bishop ventured to confide, was of some little consolation because he would take the bishop out for an occasional row or sail, whither the Bishop of Boothia Felix could not follow. At such times the Bishop of Superior took a little comfort. " Hang the fellow ! " Reginald would say, referring to the Anglican ; " what does he mean by coming down to interfere with all our good times ? " The little bishop knew very well that he ought not to countenance Reginald in such outbursts regarding so exalted a personage (exalted in more than one sense) as the spiritual lord of Boothia Felix, but as his sentiments and Reginald's agreed perfectly he uttered no reproof. It was Tuesday when the Anglican came, and it was understood that on the Sunday following he would preach at St. Andre w's- by-the-Sea, and accordingly the little stone 128 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT church was filled on that occasion. The conduct of the service was taken by a visit- ing clergyman from Boston and by the Bishop of Superior, and then, towering above the pulpit, which, so to speak, was a tight fit for him, the Bishop of Boothia Felix rose to begin his sermon. Much had not unnatu- rally been expected from so large a man, and this time expectation did not go unrewarded, for his lordship, as people perversely contin- ued to style him, proved to be a most elo- quent preacher. And the listening bishop, who could recognise clerical eloquence when he heard it, was unwillingly forced to ad- mit that his rival was as formidable in the pulpit as out of it. Doubtless he ought to have rejoiced greatly in his brother's clerical gifts and graces, as it became him, a bishop, to do, but bishops, whatever their shade of churchmanship may be, are but human, and every fibre of the small bishop's humanity rebelled at the thought of being obliged to take a second place where the first had so long been his. WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 1 29 After service the two bishops walked to the hotel together along the shady seaside road. The Bishop of Superior would have avoided this had it been possible, but his wife had gone ahead with the rector from Boston, and when the Anglican, hastening out of the robing-room, had familiarly laid his hand on the other's shoulder with the words, " Well, bishop, your wife seems to have left you in my charge to take back to the hotel," there was nothing left for the one addressed but smiling if inwardly indignant acquiescence. " I am so much pleased with Rye that I think of staying till late in September," observed the large man in the course of the walk. At hearing this calmly made announce- ment, the listener could almost have groaned aloud. Late September ! and it wanted a week to the end of July now. How were the next eight weeks to be lived through? "Wouldn't you get a better notion of the country by travelling about rather more ? " 130 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT ventured the Bishop of Superior in his very blandest tones. " Oh, I have been in the States several times before, and it seems to suit me per- fectly this season to remain for the summer in this charming spot, particularly as I can have the additional attraction of your com- pany," was the response. The other acknowledged the compliment by a bow. " You flatter me," he said, rather feebly, feeling as he spoke a wild desire to kick his reverend companion. But although he re- membered that " A kick that scarce will move a horse Will kill a sound divine," he doubted whether the result of a kick administered by his own small foot would have in this case such a desirable result. No, it would not do to try it. He must bear his cross patiently. But however patiently borne, its weight did not diminish as the days went on. If the minor bishop had WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 13! looked with smiling approval on the amuse- ments in vogue at Rye, the major bishop did even more. At billiards he proved an adept and at tennis was equally skilful, and to see his gigantic figure leaping after a high ball was a sight not to be soon forgotten and in marked contrast to the decorous skippings of the other bishop. On one very warm morning, as the two bishops were on the tennis-court with Reginald and De Lancy, the Bishop of Boothia Felix complained much of the heat, and Reginald was able to persuade the hatless prelate to don for the time a spare blazer and tennis-cap of his own. In this garb, so unusual for an eccle- siastic, the Bishop of Boothia Felix did not appear at his best, to the open delight of Reginald and the secret joy of the diocesan of Superior. The blazer which Reginald had lent the bishop was of alternate stripes of black and vivid orange, and its wearer was made by it more conspicuous than ever. At this moment the star of the minor bishop was again in the ascendant at Rye. 132 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT If it could thus have remained ! But bishops are as much at the mercy of circumstance as the most ordinary layman, even more so, the Bishop of Superior came to think. On the last evening in July the two bishops were walking most amicably along the cliff path to Little Boar's Head, and a dozen or two of the other guests were stroll- ing in their company and enjoying the quiet beauty of sea and sky in the afterglow of a late sunset. The desultory talk ceased as they gained a projecting part of the cliff and turned to look westward. The sea in front, tinged with crimson, moved slowly in long undulations. The houses on the Isles of Shoals stood out blackly against the colour behind them and the lamps of White Island light " Shone like a glorious clustered flower, Ten golden and five red." A small inland sheet of water to the left caught the sunset glow and reddened up to the borders of the dark woods on its WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 133 farther edge. A belated bird uttered a troubled cry and the faint lapping of the soft waves on the pebbles came up to their ears. It was one of those peaceful moments that come so rarely, but which have the power when they do come to banish for a while all hardness from the hearts of men. I think the Bishop of Superior could have found it possible just then to love even the Bishop of Boothia Felix. But his thoughts were not of him at that moment. He stood close to the cliff edge looking out upon the slow surging of the twilight sea, while the peace that passeth understanding filled his heart and left him no desire for speech. * Not so the other bishop. He was im- pressed with the quiet beauty of the even- ing, but in a different manner, and his feelings sought an outlet. It was for this reason that he began to say aloud in a tone quite suited to the occasion had there been need to speak at all : " Thou makest the outgoings of the morn- ing and evening to praise Thee," raising his 134 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT arm as he spoke and pointing to the glowing west. It was an unfortunate movement, for he did not notice how close he stood to the other bishop, who suddenly felt himself struck with considerable force, and, before he could recover from the shock, was knocked off his legs as he stood on the insecure edge and hurled quite over the cliff. " God bless my soul ! " exclaimed the Angli- can, aghast at the result of his impressive gesture. " What have I done ? " " Oh, you idiot ! " muttered Reginald be- tween his teeth as he rushed to the cliff edge ; " you've done for him this time." But the Bishop of Superior had not fallen far, having lodged very fortunately in the branches of a small cedar, across the top of which he lay on his back unhurt but power- less to help himself. Nor was it at first sight clearly apparent how he was to be aided by any one else. The boughs of the tree were too slender to sustain the weight of any person climbing up to assist him, and only the distribution of his weight over the WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 135 top prevented his crushing it beneath him. He could not be reached by any one standing at the foot of the tree, and it was manifestly imprudent to shake it in order to gather its ecclesiastical fruitage. What was to be done ? " I have it," said the Bishop of Boothia Felix, suddenly, and off he started on a run to the hotel, returning sooner than could have been looked for and bearing a step- ladder of considerable length, which he planted on the cliffside close to the cedar with its unwilling burden. He now mounted the ladder, which was held firmly at the foot by Reginald and De Lancy, and from this vantage-ground he seized upon his clerical friend and lifted him from his uncomfortable episcopal throne with very little effort, and set him upon his feet on the cliff. But if the small bishop had been wrathful as he lay on the treetop looking up to the soft twilight sky slowly paling from crimson into grey, he was not less so when he felt himself for the second 1 36 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT time that season swung through the air in the grasp of the mighty Northwest bishop. He knew with the quick instinct of wounded dignity precisely how he must appear dan- gling at the ends of those long arms that had already done him so much harm, and he had time in his curvilinear flight to wish that the fall had killed him. Then, at least, the Bishop of Boothia Felix would have felt the pangs of remorse for the remainder of his natural life. But remorse, or at least regret for his awk- wardness, was disturbing that reverend person just now, and having reinstated the Bishop of Superior on the cliff, he was full of apolo- gies and offers of service. The rest of the company were equally voluble with sympathy and hopes that the diocesan of Superior had sustained no injury, but the sensitive bishop knew how ridiculous an appearance he had presented, and he felt that secret laughter must tickle all their souls, whatever civil speeches they might make. He declared over and over again that he was quite WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 137 unhurt, which was true of his physical con- dition but utterly false as far as his feelings were concerned, for he knew very well that he could never hold up his head in Rye again. He added, however, that he felt rather shaken up, and if they would excuse him he would walk back to the hotel if his friend, Mr. Smith, would only give him his arm; but he earnestly begged that the others would not shorten their stroll on his account, and after some slight demurs he was suffered to return with only Reginald in his company. " Damn that idiot ! " exclaimed the younger man when the others were out of hearing. His companion pretended not to hear, but his heart echoed the malediction. The bishop breakfasted in his own apart- ments the next morning in company with his wife and Reginald, and, in response to an inquiry sent up by the cause of all his woes, who " hoped that his reverend friend was not feeling the worse for the unfortunate occurrence of yesterday," returned for answer that he felt nothing more than a headache 138 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT which would confine him to his room for the day, he feared. The three then held a council together to decide upon their next move, for the bishop had said with much emphasis that he could not stay and meet that man every day and be civil to him. " But you know our rooms are taken for the season," urged the bishop's wife, with whom economical considerations had much weight, but her husband shook his head sadly. " Better stay and fight him," said Reginald, pugnaciously. " I cannot," said the bishop. " I simply cannot. To stay means that I must remain in the daily companionship of a man who is perpetually putting me in a ridiculous and mortifying light before every one and to whom it is a most difficult thing for me to be decently civil. I know he is perfectly well-intentioned and is not aware of what he is doing, but that does not make the matter easier for me." " But where will you go ? " said his wife ; WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 139 and to this the tortured bishop made no reply. " I have a plan," said Reginald, after some moments had been spent in silence. " You, I know," turning to the bishop's wife, "prefer remaining here with your friends and in your own rooms, but I will take the bishop to the White Mountains as my guest until October if he will consent to go." To this arrangement the bishop did con- sent very willingly, and, it being arranged when his wife should join him for their return to his diocese, a few days later saw the bishop and Reginald on their way to the White Mountains. Every one was present to see them off on the Portsmouth coach, and this time the bishop was not an outside passenger. Many were the expressions of regret from the people at the hotel, mingled with hopes of seeing them the next season, but to these last the Bishop of Superior did not reply confidently. " I wish I were going with you two people," said the Bishop of Boothia Felix I4O THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT to the travellers as he stood by the coach door. " What, and leave us entirely without ben- efit of clergy ? " hurriedly interposed the wife of the departing bishop, who did not mean to give her husband a chance to utter an- other civil untruth if she could help it, if indeed he were equal to the task, which in point of fact he was not but could only gaze helplessly at Reginald. " But I am exceedingly sorry that you are going," said the major bishop when he had answered the lady, " for I have enjoyed your company greatly. Still I know how tempt- ing an offer such a trip as yours must seem, and I don't wonder you are going. Perhaps I may be able to join you later. Is it at Fabyans where you are to be ? " At this question, asked with such cheerful good nature, the bishop in the coach grew pale with dismay. Was there then no pos- sible escape for him ? But Reginald was equal to the occasion. " We go to Fabyans now," he said, with a WHY THE BISHOP LEFT RYE BEACH 14! blandness he must have caught from his clerical friend, " but only for a few days, and after that shall be continually on the move, I fancy, so that we don't know ourselves just where we shall go. It will be as the whim takes us." " Oh," said the other, looking a little dis- appointed ; " then it must be farewell for a year, but only for a year, for I mean to get here next summer." " Farewell, then, for a year," responded the Bishop of Superior with a great effort to be courteous, as he extended his hand to him. " Well," said to himself the bishop who was left in possession of the field, " I shall miss the little American very much. He is the soul of courtesy and good feeling." " Thank Heaven, we've seen the last of him," the " little American " was saying to Reginald at that very moment. THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP WHEN the Bishop of Tuscaloosa, at the age of sixty, relinquished his episco- pal duties, and entered the ranks of that very small but intensely respectable body of ecclesiastics known as " retired bishops," he was quite of the opinion that he knew ex- actly what he was about. This was natural enough, for throughout his career he had never been without this comfortable assur- ance respecting his actions. The bishop's wife was not always so sure of the clearness of her husband's mental vision, but she knew better than to say so in as many words. The bishop had taken priests' orders at the age of twenty-five, and at forty had become Bishop of Tuscaloosa, and of that sparsely peopled and very restive diocese he had, J 45 146 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT therefore, been, at the time of his retirement, the episcopal head for a score of years. The numberless fatigues consequent upon administering to the spiritual needs of a large diocese, the churches of which were as widely sundered as the schools of religious thought covered by the Church's wide man- tle (all of which schools were represented in the diocese), had made the bishop's duties both arduous and perplexing. His labours had worn upon him, and he needed rest, he told himself. He did not mean to be idle. He meant to hold himself ready to extend occasional assistance to some over- worked occupant of the episcopal bench, to preach now and then, to preside at this or that meeting of clergy or laymen where his services should be desired, all this was in his forecast of the future. But he felt that he had earned the right to retire from active clerical life, and so, no doubt, he had. Anxieties enough and to spare had attended his episcopal career from the start. He had done with them now, he told himself. He THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 147 could not know, poor man, that he was, in effect, removing from the frying-pan into the fire. Perhaps it is needless to state that the Bishop of Tuscaloosa was a conscientious man. Indeed, one's mind refuses to enter- tain the notion of a prelate who is not conscientious. A dean and decorum are not more inseparable in one's thought. But the Bishop of Tuscaloosa was narrow-minded, a quality that, though frequently found in bishops, is not invariably discovered in them, and this possession of his had been a de- cided disadvantage to him as a bishop. His churchmanship was of a primitive evangeli- cal type which made small allowances for differences of temperament and consequent shades of opinion. To him any approach to broad church views was as abhorrent as any leaning toward a high church position, while ritualism was something that excited his deepest feelings of horror. His theologi- cal training had led him to believe firmly in the existence of two arch enemies of man- 148 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT kind, suffragans, in fact, to the most subtle enemy of all, and these were what he termed Socinianism and Romanism. Now there was not a Socinian or Unitarian church any- where within the diocese of Tuscaloosa, and the Roman Catholics in that region were, like the conies, a feeble folk, and not greatly to be feared ; nevertheless, in season and out of season (and mainly out of season), through- out his diocese, its right reverend head made war upon these two delusions of the human soul. To do him justice, the bishop thought he saw abundant evidence of the deadly work of these two emissaries of Satan. In the more liberal or broad church parishes under his sway, he plainly saw Socinius stalking abroad sowing the deadly seeds of rationalism ; in other parishes the insidious Jesuit was responsible for the appearance of an altar cross here, a cassock there, and a choral service in another place. In justice to his people how was he to keep silence in the presence of these two active foes ? As time went on his attitude changed THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 149 slightly. He no longer frowned at the sight of flowers upon the altar, and he discarded the black gown ; but save for such slight yieldings to the times he stood at sixty where he had stood at thirty, a conscien- tious, valiant, but purblind defender of the faith. Very few parishes in his diocese shared in all respects the opinions of their diocesan, but they bore with him, respected him on general principles, and did genuinely admire his courage. For the windmills at which he tilted were all, in his eyes, veritable monsters. The diocese vaguely hoped that he would some day be chosen to preside over some other field, and it was prepared to meet this event with fortitude if it ever came, but it did not much expect that it would. That its respected diocesan in the plenitude of his powers would voluntarily resign his office, was something that it had never contemplated, and when this event be- fell, the diocese relapsed temporarily into a kind of stunned silence. From this state of mind it rapidly recovered, accepted its dio- I5O THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT cesan's resignation with decorous, regretful surprise, and at the expiration of the twen- tieth year of his episcopate, at which date his resignation was to take effect, presented him with a solid silver thank-offering for deliv- erance, though the same was discreetly called a slight testimonial to his eminent merits as bishop. The recipient, we may be sure, regarded it in that light, and naturally could conceive of no other in which it might be viewed. The bishop was for some time in doubt where to make his home after quitting his former diocese, but after much sitting in council with his wife and daughter, the prelate at last fixed upon the university city of Cambridge as the place of his retirement. Though admitted to the family council, his wife and daughter had not taken an active part in it, knowing that it was not expected of them. No more than Mr. Tulliver, was the Bishop of Tuscaloosa accustomed to be told the rights of things by his own fireside, though that prelate's decisions were some- THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 15! times more modified by feminine influence than he was aware. In this case, however, the choice had been the bishop's very own, and mainly due to a remembrance of Cam- bridge as seen by him on some trip north- ward in his early manhood. The choice once made, the removal to Cambridge followed soon after, and not far from the end of June the bishop and his family were established in the heart of that ancient town upon its most intensely respect- able thoroughfare. " Now," said the late diocesan of Tusca- loosa, when he and his wife and daughter were settled in their new home, " now, there is nothing to prevent my passing my declin- ing years here in peace and quietness." But there was one great obstacle in the way of this, the retired bishop himself. Matters went on smoothly with the bishop for a few months. The university year was just closing when he and his arrived upon the scene, and the class day and commence- ment festivities interested him greatly. Then 152 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT early in July his wife and daughter went to visit some relatives in western Massachu- setts, and the prelate himself was invited by the Bishop of Massachusetts to spend some weeks with him at Bar Harbour, and accepted the invitation. But in October he and his family were at home again, and life in Cam- bridge had resumed its ordinary aspect. Sev- eral receptions were given in honour of the retired bishop, and the card-basket in their hall filled up rapidly. Society evidently meant to receive the bishop with open arms. The bishop was a large man, with a voice that could be used to excellent effect in reading the service (and was so used by him), and was rather good looking, with kindly, if slightly pompous manners. But then one expects the wearer of lawn sleeves to be a little different from other men, and if a bishop may not think well of himself, who may ? And when the Bishop of Tuscaloosa retired from the active duties of the episco- pate, he did not put off his right reverend manner. THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 153 The bishop's wife was much younger than her husband; a pretty gray-haired little woman, who did not seem unduly elated over her position as the consort of a bishop. Their only child, who was not far from twenty, resembled her mother in looks, but had some of her father's tenacity of purpose, though as yet it had been exer- cised in small matters only. Both of them were pleased with their new surroundings, but the elder woman, as the nature of the situation dawned upon her, began to wonder how the head of the household would adapt himself to it. The autumn was not over before the bishop began an unofficial visitation of the various churches of his faith in Cambridge. The advanced ritual at St. Philip's filled him with horror, and when the rector came to speak with him after service, he was greeted with only the barest civility by the retired diocesan of Tuscaloosa. " I trust you were pleased with our modest service," said the rector, a little hesitatingly. 154 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT " Sir," replied the bishop, in his deepest tones, " I consider such a service an insult to the Protestant faith, a dishonour to the Church. Why, sir, Rome laughs with devil- ish glee to behold such bold adoption of her mummeries. Were I your bishop I should bring you to immediate trial for such popish practices." Now this last is extremely doubtful, for the bishop in his own administration of affairs had been extremely careful not to come to such direct issue with rectors whose ways were not his ways. But then he had seen nothing quite so advanced in his diocese. Having, so to speak, swept the offending rector before him with the besom of righteous wrath, he turned to face the few people left in the church. " I warn you," he pronounced, in his most impressive manner, " I warn you that the path you are now treading under the guid- ance of a disguised Jesuit is conducting you straight to the house of the scarlet woman of Babylon." THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 155 And then with a glow of satisfaction over duty performed he strode from the church alone, his family not having accompanied him on this occasion. Now as this deed of the bishop's had not been done in a corner, the news of it was very quickly wafted abroad through Cam- bridge and Boston. For the next week it was the topic of conversation over tea-tables and in clubs, and the newspapers had much to say. The retired but decidedly militant prelate was interviewed by reporters, his portrait was printed, and the freest com- ments upon his action were made by every one. In some quarters his action was stoutly defended, but as a rule the judgment passed upon him was decidedly unflattering. The bishop, however, remained firm in the con- viction that he had done perfectly right. On the following Sunday he attended ser- vice at St. John's, as he had done several times before, the simpler ritual there used being much to his mind ; nor had he heard anything said there much out of harmony 156 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT with his habit of thought. On the present occasion the sermon was preached by one of the broadest, most rationalistic men in the Church, and the bishop grew red with indignation as he listened. Once he half rose in his seat with an indignant murmur of protest, but his wife pulled at his coat in season to prevent this. At last, after what seemed to him a particularly daring utter- ance of the preacher, the bishop's patience gave way entirely, and he rose up, to the crimson mortification of his wife, and the secret delight of a half-dozen theological students in the pew behind him. The preacher had made a brief pause, and the bishop took advantage of this. " When such damnable heresies as these are uttered in my presence," he began, " I should be recreant to the faith I profess, unmindful of my duty to my God, and dis- loyal to the church in which I have so long held office, if I did not rise to protest against them," and having thus delivered his soul, he left the church. The sermon was re- THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 157 sumed after his exit and attentively listened to, but after the service the startling episode of the morning received its full share of comment in the aisles and porch. The bishop's wife and daughter, who had not followed him, were seen to be almost in tears, and to those who greeted them the bishop's wife attempted to say a few words in explanation of her husband's explosion, but, alas ! there was not much that could be said. No public notice was taken of the matter by the preacher or those connected with the Episcopal Theological School to which the chapel belonged, but, as before, the news- papers held high carnival over the event, and such headings as " A Bishop on the Ram- page," " Tuscaloosa's Bishop Breaks Out Again," and " The Retired Bishop Not Sleepy " were displayed over the accounts of the affair which appeared in the Boston press. The bishop perused these various reports grimly enough, but his conviction of the propriety of his course remained un- changed. 158 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT On the following Sunday the bishop's wife inquired at breakfast where her right reverend consort meant to attend church. " I shall go to St. James's," answered the bishop, severely. " I think, if you don't mind, William," said his wife, "Clara and I will go to church nearer home this morning." To this there was no reply. The bishop knew that his wife and daughter disapproved of his course, and distrusted what he might be led to do or say in the future. This was not a pleasant thought for him, but he had no intention of being influenced by their opinions in matters where he must neces- sarily be the best judge of what he ought to do. An hour or so later the bishop, un- accompanied, set out from his house, and four young men, who had been sauntering along the street in that vicinity, followed him at a respectful distance. They were reporters for as many Boston papers, and had been waiting his appearance for a half- hour. But their hopes of witnessing another THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 159 outbreak on the part of the retired prelate of Tuscaloosa were unfulfilled on this occasion. Although the bishop did not find the service at St. James's in all respects to his mind, yet there was nothing to which he could take serious exception, and he remained qui- escent, not only to the disappointment of the four reporters, but to that of a number of theological students and Harvard men, who had followed him thither, but much to the relief of the rector, who had seen the bishop very soon after the service had begun. However, the reporters were not to be wholly balked, and the next day's papers contained such headings as " Cambridge's Quiet Sun- day," " The Bishop Holds his Tongue," and " No Fight this Time," over detailed ac- counts of his attendance at St. James's Church. On the following Sunday he at- tended church at St. Peter's and found things there not at all to his mind, though he refrained from protest by word of mouth, but at last was obliged to protest his non- concurrence in all that he saw and heard by i6o THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT rising and walking majestically out of the church. And this action of his was very soon known to all. The young rector of Christ Church, who had watched the course of the bishop with a good deal of interest, and did not mean, if possible, to have a wrathful bishop striding out of his church if it could be prevented, concluded to forestall any such move by inviting the Bishop of Tuscaloosa to preach for him on the following Sunday, and to this the retired prelate readily consented. The public announcement of this fact was quite sufficient to fill the ancient church to over- flowing, and the rector, as he gazed upon crowded pews and aisles, saw no way of escape for his captive bishop save by the windows. The bishop took part in the service so far as to pronounce the absolution and to read the lessons, and his effective reading created a very favourable impression ; but his sermon on " The Church's Deadliest Foe," by which phrase he was understood to mean THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP l6l " Romanism," as shown in the adoption of " ceremonies such as we have witnessed in this church to-day," produced a sensation, as was natural. The rector was secretly amused, and others admired the curious courage of the bishop, but there were still others whose indignation got the better of their judgment, and these struggled to get out of hearing of the preacher, and in their progress to the door created more disturb- ance than the bishop's own exit at St. John's or St. Peter's had done. And again the newspapers made merry, and again the judi- cious grieved. Again the bishop's wife and daughter were brought low in humiliation, and again the bishop thanked God that he had not failed to bear witness to the truth. By this time it began to be generally acknowledged that the large body of retired clergy of various faiths in Cambridge had received an accession to their number whose personality was likely to make his retire- ment anything but a serene seclusion, and the bishop's wife realised that the trials of 1 62 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT a Southern diocese were but as the light afflictions of a moment compared to those which her husband's unfortunate choice of Cambridge as a home were likely to doom him to. To a man of his temperament and narrow thought, no other place could have been less fitted. He had chosen it mainly because of the memory of his glimpse of it long years before, and because he knew of its advantages in the way of libraries there and in Boston. But actual knowledge of it he had had none. Engrossed in his own administration of diocesan affairs, he had paid little attention to general matters out- side of it. He knew that Cambridge was a university town, but of the current of thought which probably flowed through it he had known absolutely nothing. But now, after his own short career there had brought him so prominently before the public, he was in a fair way to become intimately acquainted with the trend of that same current. The bishop's next move was awaited by Cambridge with great interest, and much THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 1 63 speculation as to what it would be was indulged in. Now the retired Bishop of Tuscaloosa, although he had very well de- fined views as to the importance of the episcopate and the necessity of bishops, had, in his own diocese, maintained very friendly relations with the non-liturgical churches therein, and had several times attended a service in a Presbyterian church without doing violence to his churchmanship in the least. Remembering this, it occurred to him, on the Sunday after his sermon at Christ Church, to bend his steps toward the Congregational church, in the shadow of the Washington elm. Neither ritualism nor rationalism would vex him in that temple, he thought. He went there early, his steps attended, although he did not know it, by the usual squad of reporters. The Congregational clergyman, who had met the bishop some weeks previously, was in the porch when the prelate entered, and at once invited him to sit in the pulpit alcove and take part in the service. To this the 164 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT bishop consented so far as to say that he would read the Scripture lesson and pro- nounce the benediction. Not without some inward discomfort had the minister perceived the bishop entering his church. He was very sure that the sermon he had expected to preach on that morning would not be at all to the bishop's liking, and he dreaded an outburst of protest from the bishop, feeling sure that if that prelate could not refrain from creating a disturbance in a church of his own faith, he certainly would have no scruple in making a scene in what he would probably style a " meeting-house." He recog- nised the reporters who had dogged the bishop's heels, and he thought dismally of the prospect in store. No, it would never do, and he hastily sent to the parsonage for another sermon, telling the sexton where it would be found. The sexton returned in season with the sermon, and the minister, somewhat embarrassed by the presence of his unlooked-for colleague and the sense of a great danger escaped, failed to perceive THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 165 that the sermon brought him was the one he had preached to his congregation the previous Sunday. Nor did he become aware of the fact till he was well into the midst of his discourse, and suddenly detected a pecul- iar expression in the faces before him. Re- treat was now too late, but there was at least nothing in the sermon to rouse the militant bishop behind him, and indeed that indi- vidual took occasion when the service was ended to praise the discourse to which he had just listened. Comment at many dinner-tables on that Sunday was divided between discussion of the clergyman's blunder and praise of the bishop's supposed liberality. Tuscaloosa's retired bishop rose in favour immediately, so far as Congregationalists were concerned. But the reporters had not been idle, and the next morning's papers contained such head- lines as, " The Bishop Hobnobs with the Congos," and " The Episcopal Lion Lies Down with the Puritan Lamb." After this the bishop found a church to his mind in 1 66 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT Boston, and attended there with more or less regularity, and for a time the newspapers turned their attention in other directions. Autumn passed suddenly into winter that year, and the bishop, walking abroad after the first snowfall, slipped at one of the street crossings, and was only saved from a severe fall by the quickness of a young man near, who caught him by the arm just in time. As it was, the bishop sustained a slight sprain, and the young man, calling a cab, accompanied him to his home. The bishop, who was a warm-hearted, effusive person, was voluble in his thanks, insisted on pre- senting him to his wife and daughter, and begged him to consider himself welcome at the episcopal residence at all times. And the young man, flattered by the overflowing gratitude of the bishop, supplemented by that of the family, did become a frequent guest at the house thereafter, and in the course of these visits discovered that the bishop's daughter was a very interesting, not to say fascinating, person. The bishop, for THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 167 t his part, found the young man, whose name was Milner, a very attractive, winsome young fellow, and took much pleasure in hearing the details of university life which came to him by way of Milner, whom he supposed to be a Harvard student. As Milner had spoken in his hearing of having attended some service at St. John's, he hastily as- sumed that the young man was a Church- man, and contented himself with expressing the hope that his young friend would not be led away by any strange doctrine which he might chance to hear there. But as the bishop's daughter came into the room at the moment, the prelate's hope was expressed to unheeding ears. Early in life the bishop had taken a strong stand against intemperance, and when, in December, the city of Cambridge waxed very much in earnest over the question of license or no license, the bishop was exer- cised likewise. A public meeting in favour of no license was to be held in a large hall, and to be addressed by the clergy 1 68 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT * of various denominations, and the retired bishop, whose views on the subject were known to some in the community, was in- vited to be present on the platform. As the clergymen assembled in the anteroom just before the meeting opened, the bishop was introduced by the Congregational minister, whose pulpit he had shared on one occasion, to a Roman Catholic priest, who was known as an enthusiastic and influential temperance reformer. Now the bishop had been heard to declare, in the course of his career, that he never would clasp the hand of a popish priest, and he remembered this vow of his after he had shaken hands with the priest on this occasion, for he caught only a part of the introduction, and supposed him from his dress to be some High Church clergy- man. When from the further remarks of the introducer he learned more of his new acquaintance, and realised what he had done, he was extremely unhappy, and was prepar- ing to stiffen into an attitude of stern and silent disapproval, when the priest's atten- THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 169 tion was fortunately turned elsewhere. He was much dismayed to find himself seated, a few moments later, next to the priest on the platform, and he edged away as far as pos- sible from his unwelcome neighbour. The priest failed to detect the discomfort his presence was causing the heretic bishop beside him ; but some among the audience, who knew the prelate's feelings respecting "Jesuitical priests," were privately much entertained when they observed his present predicament. Yet by and by, when the priest spoke some vigorous words which exactly coincided with the bishop's own views upon the matter in hand, the latter found himself applauding, but stopped abruptly when he recollected that a papist was speaking. " He has some Jesuitical purpose beneath it all," said Tuscaloosa's former diocesan to him- self. On the other side of him sat a benevolent- looking clergyman, much older than him- self, whom he did not know, but with whom he exchanged a word now and then in the 170 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT pauses of the meeting, and at its close the elder man expressed his pleasure at making the acquaintance of the bishop, and added that he hoped soon to do himself the honour of calling upon him. And in reply, the bishop, in his most gracious manner, trusted that the event would indeed not long be delayed. But when a little later he learned the name of his new clerical acquaintance, he returned home with a very clouded brow, for the benevolent-looking person who had sat beside him was none other than a promi- nent Unitarian minister of the city. His slumbers were decidedly unquiet ones that night, for the thought that he had sat for a whole evening in the public view between the representatives of the two deadliest foes of the Church, Romanism and Socinianism, was not calculated to soothe him. What a position for a defender of the faith to have been placed in ! Now by this time the bishop was fully aware of the status of Unitarianism in his THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP Ijl present locality, and knew, too, that many of the people whom he met in ordinary life were what he termed Socinians, but, while he deeply regretted that such estimable ap- pearing people should have fallen into such deadly error, he did not include them in his circle of disapproval any more than he did the Roman Catholic laity whom he had happened to know. No, it was only the disseminators of false doctrines, the Socinian preachers and the popish priests, whom he would place under the ban. And holding such uncompromising views as he felt it his serious duty to hold, he had, nevertheless, grasped the hand of a Romish priest, and was about to receive a call from a Socinian preacher! It is needless to say that the Bishop of Tuscaloosa was very uncomfort- able about this time, and would have been glad to relieve his feelings by publicly read- ing a commination service directed wholly at Socinians and Jesuits. But no such means of relief was open to him, and he bore his trials as best he could, which was not very 172 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT well, and his wife and daughter bore theirs likewise, for the retired bishop did not pro- pose to suffer alone and in silence. " I never in the world can see him when he calls," cried the perplexed prelate. "What excuse can you offer, father?" inquired Clara. "I can say that my principles will not allow me to receive one whose mission in life is the destroying of souls," was the bishop's vigorous reply to this. " William ! " said the bishop's wife, quickly. The bishop stared at his helpmate in dis- may. In all his knowledge of her she had never spoken with just that ring of exaspera- tion in her voice. But if he had borne much, so had she, and her husband had been the cause of it all. If they were ever to live in this home of theirs with any degree of com- fort, if they were ever to mingle in society here, she must assert herself, and she was doing it now. "William," she repeated, "you will not send any such insolent message to that THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 173 Unitarian clergyman when he calls upon you. I approve of his doctrines no more than you, but he is a gentleman, and when I married you I thought you were one also." The bishop could only gasp in helpless fashion, and his wife went on, remorselessly : " I do not question your sincerity in all that you have done since you came here, but I do doubt your common sense, and what you now propose to do will make you the scorn and contempt of every gentleman you know. I used to be proud of you, Wil- liam, but since we came here you have done little for me to be proud of for your sake." And here the speaker quite broke down in her eloquence, and left the room in tears. Clara remained just long enough to hurl one indignant arrow at her father, who sat in his chair quite stunned by what he had just heard : " It's every word true, and you know it is, father," and then she, too, disappeared. Left quite to himself, the bishop leaned his head upon his hand, and proceeded to do 1 74 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT very some hard thinking. It was no prim- rose path in which he had been walking since he came to Massachusetts. It was a steep and thorny way, rather, and he began to be doubtful whither it would lead him. He did not regret having pursued the course which he had taken, he told himself. It had been forced upon him by circumstances, and he should count himself an unworthy soldier of Christ if he had remained inactive in the presence of the Church's foes. But he did regret that his wife should have been made to suffer. His experiences had been un- pleasant, but hers, he saw now, had been far worse. It did not occur to him to leave Cambridge, and find a home elsewhere. Retreat was something he did not contem- plate, but he had protested strenuously so far against what he deemed evil. His atti- tude was now well known to the community. Was it needful for him to continue active protestation against Socinianism and po- pery ? He could not be accused of running away from these enemies of a pure faith, THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 175 and, after much questioning with himself, he finally resolved to confine himself here- after to private admonition and warning. He had reached this point in his medita- tions, when the housemaid appeared in his study with the card of the Unitarian minis- ter. He held the card so long in his hand, and appeared so agitated, that the maid was alarmed. " Shall I tell him you are unwell and beg to be excused ? " she asked. He still hesitated. Then, with a visible effort to command his voice, he answered, " No, you may show him into the study." The bishop's wife had conquered. The visitor remained for nearly an hour, and found the bishop much better company than he had expected to do. They even discovered that a certain old friend of one was a friend of the other, and this helped to draw them together. But they carefully avoided possi- ble points of controversy. The bishop's wife came into the study when the caller had departed. 176 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT " My dear," said her husband, " I found the gentleman most entertaining and agree- able, and I have asked him to dine with us next Tuesday." Then the bishop's wife saw the extent of her victory, and knew that her husband had made as near an approach to a confession of his mistake as an elderly and slightly hot- headed bishop could be expected to make. She said nothing, but came and stood beside his chair for a moment, and then suddenly stooped and kissed him. " Why, my dear ! " said the bishop, gently. As the winter slipped by, and people be- gan to forget or lose sight of the peculiarities of the retired bishop, he and his family saw much of their neighbours, and mingled more or less in Cambridge and Boston society. He was still regarded by some persons as likely to burst forth in denunciations of So- cinianism and popery at any moment, but he had kept close watch upon himself, and their expectations had not been gratified. Mean- while, his daughter had drawn about her a THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 177 wide circle of acquaintance, and the number of Harvard students who lifted their hats to her in the street was more than she could have told. Some of them were in the habit of calling more or less regularly at the bishop's, but, so far as could be seen, Milner was the one to whom the greatest favour was shown. One other, however, appeared to be not far behind in the running, a tall, athletic-looking fellow, named Emerson. One evening, soon after Easter, Clara came into the study where her father sat writing alone. " I have had an offer of marriage, father," she began, abruptly. The bishop's pen dropped from his hand. " From whom, my daughter ? " he inquired, after his shock of surprise was over. " From Mr. Emerson." The bishop looked gravely pompous. " I know nothing of the man," he said, " beyond the fact that he has agreeable man- ners, and is said to be wealthy. Are you fond of him, Clara?" he went on, wishing to 1 78 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT know his daughter's state of mind before saying anything definitely. " I like him very much," was the response. " But, this is a serious matter, Clara. Is he a religious young man, do you know, my daughter?" " He is a Roman Catholic," answered Clara. The bishop bounded from his chair on hearing this. " A papist, and a Jesuit ! " he burst forth. " And you tell me you love him. A child of mine marry a papist! I would sooner see you struck dead at my feet." " But I didn't tell you I loved him, father. I said I liked him very much, and so I do. But I don't love him, and I told him this, and said I could not marry him, an hour ago," and then, before the Bishop of Tusca- loosa could recover from the effect of this statement, she had fled. " But if I had loved him, nothing would have prevented my marrying him, at last," she said to herself, in her own room, as she recalled her father's looks of horror. THE TRIALS OF A RETIRED BISHOP 1 79 " I don't believe in such awful prejudices against people on account of their religion." The bishop did not at all relish his daughter's trifling thus with his feelings, but he did not allude to the episode, and Mr. Emerson came to the house no more. Young Milner, however, continued to call as frequently as ever, and on one occasion he and the bishop chanced to be alone in the prelate's study. There had been a lull in the conversation which the younger man was the first to disturb. " I suppose, sir, I ought to have spoken with you on a certain matter before now, but, the fact is, it happened almost before we knew, and " " What happened ? I don't know what you are talking about," interrupted the bishop. " The engagement. Clara's and mine, I mean," said the other, in an embarrassed fashion. Now the bishop liked young Milner ex- ceedingly, and though he did not like to know that an engagement had been entered i8o THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT into before he had been consulted in regard to it, he was not going to say much in the way of disapproval until he had time to think over the matter, if disapproval should then be necessary. But he was frowning slightly as Milner spoke again. " Clara tells me that you suppose me to be a Churchman," said the young man. " I certainly have supposed so," said the bishop. " I had no intention of deceiving you," resumed the other. " I had thought, till to- day, that you knew me to be a student at the Divinity School." "Does that mean that you are a Socin- ian ? " exclaimed the bishop, with rising horror. " I am a radical Unitarian," said Milner, quietly. A NIGHT WITH WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM A NIGHT WITH WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM EVEN-SONG at Winchester Cathedral was over. The choir-boys and vicars choral had passed slowly out of the choir, followed in due order by the precentor and the two minor canons, and after these came the canon in residence and the dean, who stepped down from their red-curtained stalls simultaneously. Three of the small con- gregation lingered to look about them a little longer at the strange mortuary chests on the choir-screens, at Prior Silkstede's carved pulpit, and at the low tomb below the lectern, which no one in the light of present knowledge quite dares to call that of William Rufus, as was once the custom. They were strangers in Winchester; and Bond, the most good-natured of the four 183 184 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT vergers, waited for them at the choir en- trance till his patience was exhausted, and he felt constrained to tell them, in gentle tones, that it was customary to close the choir immediately after service. If they wished to make the round of the cathedral they might do so on the morrow, he sug- gested, as there would be but little present opportunity for so doing before it would be time to close the doors for the night. The three persons addressed left him to infer that they would return the next day, and then passed slowly down the long nave to the door at the end of the north aisle. There, having nothing more in common than the fact of being in Winchester for the first time, they separated, one of them going by the lime walk to the High Street, another toward the archway under the Tower of St. Maurice's, and the third, a young man of perhaps twenty-five, passing into the Close by way of the Slype. As they left him, the verger was about locking the ornamental iron gates of the choir, when his attention A NIGHT WITH WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM 185 was called elsewhere by the dean, who had now doffed his surplice and hood and desired him to go on some errand to the cathedral library. On his return to the dean, who was awaiting him in the chapter-room, the verger had quite forgotten the gates, and unlocked they still remained a half-hour later when he left the building for the night. Meanwhile, the young man, after wander- ing about the Cathedral Close and pausing to admire the three sharply pointed arches of the deanery entrance, had slowly retraced his steps and had passed into the "dark cloister " under the library at the end of the south transept. Twilight was rapidly com- ing on, but he could just perceive that a small door leading into the transept stood open, and the impulse seized him to enter. He found himself, on doing so, in a gloomy passageway, from which a stone stair led up to the library, and another open door into the transept itself. He had hardly time to perceive this before he heard the voices of the dean and the verger, who were leaving 1 86 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT the chapter-room. He hastily sprang up the stair, and the dean passed out to the " dark cloister " and on to the deanery, un- aware of the presence of a stranger close at hand. A moment later one of the choir- boys came hurriedly through the doorway and entered the transept. He had left some of his school exercises in his anthem-book, and had returned in search of them. Bond, who was busied at the end of the nave just then, did not observe the small figure, which, indeed, did not court observation, and which, on discovering that the choir gates were unlocked, congratulated itself that its retreat might be made unnoticed. The young man was about to follow in the direction the boy had taken when the verger came in sight, passed out into the "dark cloister," and locked the door behind him. The echo of the closing door reached the ear of the small occupant of the choir, and he rushed breathlessly through the transept to the door, only to find that it was locked. Then, running back, he tried the door in A NIGHT WITH WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM 187 the south aisle, with no better results. From there he went to the three doors in the west end of the cathedral, but Bond had locked these as carefully as the others. Beside the third of these the boy waited a long time, hoping that he might hear footsteps along the path without, and then by calling aloud attract the attention of passers-by. The young man, not hearing the boy return, supposed him to have left by another way, and, feeling himself entirely alone, en- tered the transept, and, going up the steps into the choir aisle, he found the south or throne door of the choir partly ajar. Push- ing this open he went into the choir, and, after roaming at will in the fast-gathering gloom, he seated himself upon the bishop's throne and leaned back against the velvet hangings. By this time it had grown very dark in the cathedral, and only a few rays of light struggled in through the clerestory windows. The young man realised that he was locked in and must spend the night in this place, but the thought did not disturb 1 88 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT him. In fact, it was what he had secretly hoped for. This was the first cathedral he had seen, and he wanted to experience all the emotions possible in regard to it. He had sat there for an hour, perhaps, when far off he heard the sound of slow footsteps and then sobs as of some one in distress. The cathedral was utterly dark now, and he could not even see the gleam of the great white reredos on which the light had lingered longest. In spite of himself, the young man could not help a little shiver of fear. The footsteps wandered about aim- lessly in the darkness; but they were cer- tainly coming nearer, and there was no mistaking the sobs. In reality the listener heard only the small choir-boy, who, despair- ing of hearing any sounds from the outside world through the massive door, and sadly frightened at being left alone in the dark- ness, was stumbling along the nave, intend- ing to curl himself up in the dean's stall in the choir, behind the red curtains. But this the young man could not know, and he A NIGHT WITH WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM 189 almost wished himself outside of the cathe- dral. Up the steps to the choir came the groping feet, then the gates opened and closed with a little clang that sent a score of faint echoes flying down the stone vault- ing of the nave. As the boy clambered up into the dean's stall and drew the curtains about him, a vague sense of protection came to him from their folds ; his sobs ceased, and before long he fell asleep. Intently expectant of he knew not what, the young man listened till all these sounds had died away, and, now that they were ended, he was disappointed that nothing of note seemed to follow them. He wondered if his imagination had not deceived him, and, as the only sounds that succeeded were the quarter chimes from the tower far above him, he was sure his ears had played him false, and began to think that a night spent in an English cathedral would prove no more exciting than one passed in the old meeting-house of his native town in America. He had pictured to him- IQO THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT self a throng of famous historic phantoms, headed by Cnut and Edward the Confessor, with William Rufus, William of Wykeham, the fierce Gardiner, and many more in their train, ending, perhaps, with Izaak Walton and Jane Austen, sweeping noiselessly along through choir and nave in impressive silence, and here was nothing of the kind. Perhaps his fancy might have summoned up all these famous ones had it been light enough to have seen any object, even dimly ; but all about him was now black darkness, and so, after a time, for the bishop's throne was very comfortable, his romantic desires became confused and merged in sleep. Hours after, a pale light came in through the northern windows of the clerestory, which steadily grew brighter until broad bands of yellow moonlight slanted across the nave and choir, lit up more faintly the north transept, filled the Lady Chapel through its broad windows with a flood of brightness, and made the marble chantries of Waynflete and Cardinal Beaufort show A NIGHT WITH WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM IQI fairer even than by day. They lay upon the dark stalls of the choir and peered through their rich carvings, as they had been doing for centuries ; struck across the cheek of the young man on the throne of the bishop, but failed to waken him ; and fell full upon the eyes of the small boy in the decanal stall, and awoke him with a start. The face of the person on the throne at once caught his frightened gaze. He re- membered that one of the larger choir- boys had told him how, on certain nights of the year, old Bishop Wykeham was in the habit of leaving his chantry in the nave, where he had been lying for the last five hundred years, and going up into the choir to sit upon the throne. The story must have been true, he thought, and that must surely be the bishop himself sitting there so white and quiet with his mitre off. As the boy watched the throne in terror, the young man stirred slightly in his sleep, and a half- audible exclamation escaped him. At this the boy cowered down in his place, and then, IQ2 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT not daring to look again at the supposed bishop, crept out, opened the choir gates noiselessly, passed into the nave, thence into the north transept, and along the north choir aisle till he had gained the retro-choir behind the great reredos and the feretory. Beside the chantry of Bishop Waynflete he paused to listen whether or no he were pursued. The moonbeams lighted up the features of the sleeping effigy within the chantry, as they had done the face of Wykeham on the throne. The thought came to the boy that, perhaps, this bishop could leave his tomb likewise, and, as a sound like a low moan was heard just then, he fled in affright into the Lady Chapel, and hid in one of the stalls there. It was but the rising wind outside that he had heard, but of this he was ignorant. His terrified imagination now asserted itself, and to his fancy all the famous men and women whom he knew were buried in the cathedral seemed to pass through the retro-choir in a stately round of the cathedral. He was sure A NIGHT WITH WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM 193 that he saw them through the openwork of the parclose screen separating the chapel from the retro-choir. But while they were still moving past him with slow strides, the cathedral grew suddenly dark, for heavy clouds obscured the moon, and the boy saw the phantoms no more. Soon after, the young man awoke, and, for a time, was unable to think where he was, till, putting out his hand, he touched the purple hangings of the throne. He wondered then what hour it might be. The cathedral clock sounding the double quarters just then did not help him, and, striking a match, he looked at his watch, the hands of which indicated half after four. He was broad awake now, and, knowing that he could not get to sleep again, he drew a cigar from his pocket, lighted it, and was soon smoking vigorously, a ceremony which it is safe to say had never been performed in that place by any of his episcopal predecessors. The boy, who had not found himself at all comfortable in the hard, uncushioned stalls 194 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT of the Lady Chapel, was now, under cover of the darkness, stealing back to the dean's seat in the choir. After he was once more ensconced therein, he ventured to look in the direction of the throne. It was too dark to distinguish the face of Bishop Wykeham, but where he had seen it was now gleaming a small red fire, which paled at times, and then glowed fiercely. This sight was too much for the endurance of the poor child, who sank back in mortal terror among the curtains, and hid his face in their friendly folds. He dared not look again toward the throne, and after a time he fell into a troubled sleep. Daylight presently began to make itself felt in the cathedral. Uncertain shadows took on form as they emerged one by one from the gloom. When the first rays of the sun kindled the gorgeous colours in the east window high above the reredos, the young man rose from the throne, and walked slowly about the cathedral till the time should come for it to be opened. The hours dragged on A NIGHT WITH WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM 195 slowly enough, but at last he heard a key turn in some far-off lock. He started in the direction of the sound, but paused when he had taken but a step or two. The person entering would naturally ask how he came to be there. As he was not prepared to face this question, he waited behind one of the columns in the north transept till two women, who had come to sweep the choir, had begun their work. It was at the very moment when he, quite unobserved, was passing out of the cathedral by the door at the end of the north aisle that the women discovered the sleeping occupant of the dean's stall. Disturbed by their exclamations of wonder, he awoke, and, in reply to their questions, told how he came to be there, how he had seen Bishop Wykeham sitting on the episcopal throne, then of the visions he had seen in the retro- choir, and, lastly, of the strange fire which he. had seen burning on the throne. Bond and the other vergers, coming in soon after, heard the end of the tale with many expres- 196 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT sions of incredulity; but on going to the throne they found the curtain dragged aside, and the cushions pulled about. The char- women thereupon declared the boy's tale to be a true one, and the vergers looked puzzled. The boy evidently told his story in good faith, and, beyond question, some- body or something had been sitting under the canopy of the throne. The dean was appealed to later. The curtains still re- mained awry and the cushions disturbed, and the two charwomen added some con- fused details of ashes, which they had brushed up from the floor of the bishop's throne. The dean himself questioned the boy, but the lad did not swerve from his first story. He had seen a face like Bishop Wykeham's in the moonlight there against the throne curtains, then from the Lady Chapel he had watched the long procession moving through the retro-choir, and then from the midst of the darkness he had seen the red flame where Wykeham's face had been before. A NIGHT WITH WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM 197 The dean promptly rejected the account of the procession as the result of an over- wrought fancy, but was disposed to think the substance of the rest of the tale might be true, although, to the disappointment of the two charwomen and the elder vergers, he did not incline to the theory of Bishop Wykeham's occupation of the throne the previous night. At matins, at ten o'clock, the dean made a short address to the small congregation present, to the effect that, owing to certain events which had recently taken place, he felt compelled to impose greater restrictions upon all persons visiting the cathedral for other than purposes of worship, and added that tourists could on no account be per- mitted to go about the building unaccom- panied by a verger. A young man sitting in one of the stalls shrank back guiltily against the carved work as he listened to the dean, and a small choir-boy among the decani was lost in wonder. What had tour- ists to do with the dead Bishop Wykeham ? THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP THE Bishop of Wimborne was discon- tented. Now to most persons, cer- tainly to those of us who are not bishops, but who, if clergymen of lesser eminence, would very much like to be bishops, the implied association of ideas in the statement just made is, to say the very least, a trifle bewildering. And what call indeed has a bishop to be discontented ? we may well ask. Has he not attained (at least if he be of the American Church, where at present there are no archbishoprics) unto all that is to be hoped for? It is quite true that a Bishop of New York may count for more, in his own estimation, than, let us say, his right reverend brother of Western Texas, but the last-named prelate has as much weight in the House of Bishops as any other of its 202 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT members, and huge lawn sleeves are at once awe-inspiring and imposing by whomsoever worn. In the English Church the two great prizes of Canterbury and York, and the lesser prizes of Armagh and Dublin, yet remain to dazzle the eyes of lord bishops, but the mind stubbornly refuses to entertain a conception of lords spiritual who sulk because the Prime Minister and Heaven, in concerted action, have not made them into primates and metropolitans. To the ordinary comprehension, therefore, discon- tent appears like the very last emotion in which a bishop is likely to indulge. And yet the diocesan of Wimborne was just that presumably impossible person, a discon- tented bishop ! His disquiet was no new thing indeed. It had begun as far back as when he held the colonial bishopric of Selkirk in British America. Now, without much question, the Bishop of Selkirk had been a great personage in his own diocese, for within that remote and almost uncharted portion THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 2O3 of the Church firmament, there shone no stars of greater magnitude than his own, or any, in fact, whose brilliancy at all approached it. Archdeacons and rural deans are very estimable persons in their way, and have their place in the ecclesiastical economy, but as luminaries of the spiritual world they must of very necessity pale their ineffectual fires before the brightness of a bishop who shineth at noonday. Not that the Selkirk prelate was vain. How should he be so, he who had full often preached against that failing which, moreover, besets only the lay portion of humanity, as he assumed ? But it is no unpleasant experience to be at the head of the procession, whether one be bishop or drum-major. Such being the case, it seemed to some critics rather unwise for the Bishop of Sel- kirk to relinquish the substantial glory that was his in Selkirk for possibly greater, but certainly undefined, glory that might be had elsewhere. To leave his sure place in the Anglican firmament and shoot madly across 204 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT the Church's middle sky in order to effect a lodgment in a different constellation, was, on the face of it, a hazardous proceeding. It did not appear thus to him, however, for not only had he shone as a star of the first order in Selkirk for ten years, but he con- templated shining with undiminished lustre somewhere for the remainder of his career on earth. In all this he may have shown some narrowness of mental vision, but then we cannot all be persons with wide horizons. He had gone to Selkirk as a colonial bishop when but little past his fortieth birth- day, and he had worked hard there for an entire decade. Now he felt that he might, without blame, retire from the arduous labours incident to the administration of church affairs in a colonial see, and return to England, which he had left as a young priest more than twenty years before. He had not been happy in Selkirk, but had made no outward complaint. Only to him- self was his discontent made known, and even then it bore a much softer name. But THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 205 when at the end of a ten years' episcopate he saw no prospect of translation to a see with a more endurable climate than that of Selkirk, he resigned his bishopric, returning to England with the unshaped thought in his mind that it might be well to place himself within the Prime Minister's range of vision should any English sees become vacant. Very soon after arriving in Eng- land, he was offered an important living in Norfolk, and accepting this, he presently settled down into the ways of English life as vicar of St. Peter-per-Mountergate in Norwich. Had the new vicar taken any one into his confidence before leaving his colonial diocese, such a confidant, supposing him possessed of ordinary sense, must infallibly have suggested the extreme improbability of the Prime Minister passing over the claims of eminent clergymen whose merits were well known to him, in order to place over an English see a retired colonial prel- ate. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister and 206 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT Heaven, presently, did this most unlikely thing, for the incumbent of St. Peter-per- Mountergate became the Bishop of Wim- borne within a year after leaving Selkirk. This action on the part of the Prime Minister and Heaven occasioned great sur- prise throughout the Establishment, except in one locality, the breast of the new Wim- borne prelate. He, and very properly, too, from his standpoint, considered the honour only in the light of a gracious and timely acknowledgment of his eminent fitness for such a post. The wisdom of his resignation of the British-American see was now amply justified by this descent of the Wimborne mitre upon his brows. It took some little time for the novelty of his position at the head of an English see to wear away. To exchange a vast diocese, thinly settled and scantily provided with the appliances of civilisation, ecclesiastical or otherwise, to exchange this for a com- pact little bishopric, where there was plenty to do, to be sure, but which (if the phrase THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 2O7 may be used in this connection) was well appointed with a comfortable palace in the cathedral city, this was indeed a transition to make a man as cheerful of countenance and as glad of heart as ever the Scriptural oil and wine might suffice to do. And for a time the Bishop of Wimborne was as cheerful of mien and as joyful of heart as it became him to be. But it was only for a time that he was thus elate, one regrets to say. So far as this prelate was especially concerned, the episcopal sky was wholly overcast within a year, with small prospects of clearing weather presented to his discernment. In the mat- ter of worldly prosperity he ought to have been abundantly satisfied, for to be Bishop of Wimborne was quite the equivalent of being blessed in basket and in store. But he was not satisfied. To put it very plainly, the prelate was downright discontented. And it was no vague unrest, either, that disturbed the slumbers of the diocesan of Wimborne and intruded upon his waking hours. It 2o8 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT was, on the contrary, a very definite, and, in his view, amply sufficient source of annoy- ance. Now when the mitre of Wimborne had been offered to the incumbent of St. Peter- per-Mountergate within a twelvemonth after his resignation of the Selkirk diocese, that personage, accepting it with decorous joy, had, at the moment, been very far from looking squarely in the mouth so handsome a gift-horse as this. He had gone actively at work in the administration of affairs in the diocese of Wimborne, and it was not until Parliament was about assembling for its next session that a very disagreeable fact began to dawn upon his perceptions. Although born in England, his youth had all been passed in the colonies, and until after his resigation of the Selkirk bishopric he had lived in England, since his infancy, only during the years he had spent in the University of Oxford. He was aware that the House of Lords was composed of tem- poral and spiritual peers, and, without taking THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 209 pains to inform himself further, had con- fidently assumed that all English bishops sat in the House of Lords. It was only a short time before the queen's speech from the throne that he made the discovery that there were several dioceses whose spiritual heads were entitled to appear in the Upper House at certain times only, and in obedi- ence to a rule of succession. This rule was necessitated by the fact that only twenty- four spiritual peers could be accommodated with seats in the House of Lords at one time, and that there were more bishops than seats. Moreover, there was one diocese whose episcopal head was for ever ineligible to a seat in Parliament, and that diocese was Wimborne. " This is an outrage," exclaimed the prel- ate, indignantly, to his chaplain, when he learned this startlingly unpleasant fact, and the chaplain quite agreed with his superior, but didn't see that anything could be done about it. The bishop was not so sure of this, how- 2IO THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT ever, but presently recovered his dignity, and, as his chaplain fancied, dismissed the matter from his mind. But in reality the aggrieved bishop did no such thing. Though he said nothing further to his chaplain on the matter, he thought about it so continu- ally that he came at least to feel that his exclusion from the body of spiritual peers was not only a wrong done to him person- ally, but an indignity placed upon the whole Establishment. Now all this was most un- reasonable on his part, let us grant, but when have discontented people, either clerical or lay, been perfectly reasonable ? At the second opening of Parliament that occurred after the enthronement of the Bishop of Wimborne, it chanced that the turn of the Welsh bishopric of St. Asaph to representation in the House of Lords had come, but the spiritual head of that diocese was then travelling for his health, and did not mean to take his seat as one of that august body for at least a month, or until his return from the Continent. The Welsh THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 211 bishop had been but little in England, and was personally known to but few of the lords spiritual, while his absence in foreign parts was a matter of which scarcely any one outside of his diocese was cognisant. His vacant seat was, therefore, unremarked when Parliament assembled, for, as a matter of fact, only a scant half dozen of bishops was present on that occasion. The Bishop of Wimborne, surveying the scene from a dark corner of the visitors' gallery, could not at all understand such indifference to privilege on the part of his spiritual brethren. He would have been only too glad to sit through the thirteen years of another Long Parlia- ment had opportunity offered, but, alas ! so long as he remained only a Bishop of Wim- borne he might never sit with that goodly company at all. It was hard indeed. Yet he paid daily visits to the House of Lords on the card of one or two members whom he knew, sitting in the gallery of which he was the sole occupant, and feeling very much like the Peri shut out from Paradise. But 212 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT the resemblance between himself and the Peri at the gates of Eden extended no further than the unhappiness of their respec- tive conditions, for the portly prelate of Wimborne was, to outward seeming, very little like a Peri, and could never have been mistaken for one, even by the most short- sighted. The bishop had not hitherto appeared in apron and gaiters during his stay in Lon- don, but in the dress of an ordinary clergy- man simply. On the fifth day, however, it pleased him to take his daily walk to West- minster clad in all respects as a bishop should be habited when he takes the air, and most imposing did he appear in conse- quence. Any impartial observer would have said without a moment's hesitation that such a pair of shapely black-gaitered calves as his were as well worthy to be displayed in the House of Lords as those of my Lord Bishop of London himself. Some such thought was in their owner's mind as he walked slowly past Whitehall. He had planned to THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 213 return to Wimborne on the morrow, and this was to be his last glimpse of that august body whence he was, as he felt, so unjustly excluded. As he neared Westminster Hall, he was greeted by a prelate whom he did not know, but who, nevertheless, called him by name. . It was not his own name, how- ever, but that of the Bishop of St. Asaph, whom the Wimborne prelate closely resem- bled in face and figure. He had been made aware of the circumstance not long before, when he learned of the Welsh bishop's absence on the Continent, but had not be- stowed much thought upon either circum- stance. But he was aware that the spiritual peer for whom he had been mistaken had, in the progress of events, become entitled to a seat in Parliament, and his new acquaint- ance, the Bishop of Carlisle, was, of course, similarly aware of it. " I h am much pleased that your turn has come at last," said the Cumberland prelate, blandly. " I am sure we shall all be glad to have you with us. It is some time since 214 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT there has been a new person amongst us. The Bishop of St. Albans, whose seat has now become yours in right of succession, was a most excellent person in his prime, but that, you know, was a long time ago." All this had followed so quickly upon the greeting itself that the bishop addressed had not yet found time to tell the speaker of the mistake that had been made. And before the Bishop of Carlisle had paused a terrible temptation presented itself to Wimborne's chief shepherd. Why should not he fill, for a few days at least, the seat of the absent Welsh prelate ? If the Bishop of St. Asaph were known by sight to but few of the bish- ops, neither was he himself any better known for that matter. No doubt the devil whispers at times in the ear of the best of bishops, just as he was in fact doing at this moment in the ear of the Bishop of Wimborne, and no doubt, too, had the time for decision not been so extremely short, the evil counsellor afore- said would have been driven ignominiously away, after the manner of bishops when THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 215 dealing with the arch-enemy of mankind. But the Wimborne prelate was caught at sore disadvantage. He had been so taken aback on hearing himself addressed as Bishop of St. Asaph that he had been unable to explain matters before the Cumberland prel- ate had gone on to say how they should all be glad to see him in his proper place among the lords. And so, with the devil whispering at one ear, and the Bishop of Carlisle at the other, it is not to be greatly wondered at that the listener to them both should stumble at length into the path in which both were bid- ding him to walk. " I shall be very glad to be there," he soon found himself saying in reply to both counsellors. This was true enough, and committed him to nothing as he told him- self, and then, while the Northern prelate continued to enlarge upon topics of the moment, the Bishop of Wimborne found himself drawn along into the vestibule of the House of Lords, and then introduced to several prelates as the Bishop of St. Asaph. 216 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT A moment more found him seated among the lords spiritual. Up to the moment of the introductions he had said to himself that he must not let the joke go any further, and that he would declare his identity before he should enter the august chamber. But the Bishop of Carlisle had talked so continuously that the other had not been able to get in a word edgewise, and when the first intro- duction took place the tongue of Wimborne's diocesan, refusing to perform the office truth required of it, would utter only the polite commonplaces of greeting. The mischief was done. It was an awful joy that filled the soul of the Bishop of Wimborne as he sat for awhile on those soft cushions along with three or four others of the lords spiritual. It must be admitted that there was nothing going on just then worth anybody's listening to, even though one of the lords temporal was lifting up his voice to protest against the disestablishment of the Welsh Church, but still the bishop experienced an uplift of spirit THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 217 never known before. This was indeed to drink delight of battle with one's peers, he told himself, with pardonable confusion of thought. For an hour or two he banished from his mind all considerations of exit from the scrape into which, by no fault of his own, surely by no fault of his own, the devil and the Bishop of Carlisle had jointly per- sisted in bringing him. But as he sat alone in his room at the hotel that evening he did then think a great deal about the matter. It certainly was not his fault if he resembled very nearly the Bishop of St. Asaph ; neither was it his fault if the Cumberland prelate had mistaken him for the Flintshire bishop. And again he felt that thrill of awful joy as he reflected that he had once sat in the House of Lords, even though he had so sat in the borrowed dignity of a Welsh bishop. (He could not bring himself even now to say stolen dig- nity.) Yes, he had sat there sure enough, and now what was to come of it all ? He could 218 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT not sit there again, that was certain. The Bishop of St. Asaph might appear at any moment to demand his seat, and such a de- mand, then and there made, would be very awkward for the Bishop of Wimborne to support with dignity, to say the least of it. He remembered how, in a century long past, the Archbishops of York and Canterbury had wrangled over the same question of seats, and how his Grace of York, finding argument of no avail, had thereupon promptly plumped himself down in the lap of his astonished rival as a practical asser- tion of his rights. That kind of protest might have done very well for mediaeval archbishops to make use of, but it was hardly practicable for even ordinary bishops to adopt now. It was highly unlikely that the Bishop of St. Asaph would rudely attempt to sit in a usurping bishop's lap, but even without resorting to such active measures he might, nevertheless, make matters extremely un- pleasant for the episcopal usurper aforesaid. The more the Wimborne prelate consid- THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 219 ered the subject, the more difficult of solution it appeared. It was open to him to write to the Bishop of Carlisle, and say frankly that, finding himself taken for his spiritual brother of St. Asaph, he had, perhaps unwisely, thought to treat the matter as a joke, to be explained later. But would the Bishop of Carlisle treat it as a joke, he asked himself, anxiously. Perhaps that esteemed prelate's sense of humour was so slight that he might altogether fail to perceive any joke in the fact that one bishop had personated another bishop in so sacred a place as the House of Lords. In that case, what was the Bishop of Wimborne to say in further excuse ? Or, if the Cumberland prelate should chance to see the humorous side of the situation, would my Lords of Ely, Norwich, Lichfield, and Peterborough, with whom he had that day sat, see its mirthful aspects likewise ? And even if they did relish the joke, what should he say to the Bishop of St. Asaph when, in the natural course of events, he should encounter that now dreaded personage? 220 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT However easily the other lords spiritual might be moved to laughter, the Welsh bishop might very properly decline to see the full humour of the circumstance. No, it was not feasible for him to write in explana- tion to the Bishop of Carlisle. But if the whole story became public, as some day it must surely do, what was he to say for himself then ? With what sort of face could he meet the clergy and laity of his Wimborne diocese when every one of them would probably be thinking hard things of him ? At his consecration he had prom- ised to show himself " in all things an exam- ple of good works unto others that the adversary might be ashamed of having nothing to say against him." Was it then a good work to take another's name and dignities ? And was the adversary really ashamed at this present moment, and had this same adversary nothing truly to urge against the right reverend head of the Wim- borne see ? For the first time since his leaving it, the Bishop of Wimborne now THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 221 wished himself back in his colonial see of Selkirk. " Oh, what a tangled web we weave When first we practise to deceive," he found himself repeating. But then he had not practised deception. He had not woven any web deliberately. It had all been forced, yes, forced upon him. If he were to blame in the matter, so was the Bishop of Carlisle to blame for not knowing his brother bishops apart. Still he knew that in the general estima- tion, as well as at the General Assize, when the secrets of all hearts shall be made known, he, and not the Bishop of Carlisle, would be judged as having done that which ought to have been left undone. And however far off might be the date of that General Assize, it could not be long, indeed, before the pub- lic would be cheerfully deciding upon his case. His identity had not been suspected by any of the lords bishops whom he had met that day for the first time, but, in the 222 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT course of ordinary conversation within the next twenty-four hours, any one of them might learn that the Bishop of St. Asaph was on the Continent, and that his place had that day been rilled by an impostor. He was aware that Jovianan the Proud had once been personated by an angel, whose likeness to the defrauded monarch was so close as to deceive all beholders, but it was extremely unlikely that the Bishop of St. Asaph, or anybody else, in the year 1893, would give much credence to the no- tion of an angel having sat for a few hours among the spiritual peers in the House of Lords, in the room of one of their number. And without intending any disrespect to the lords spiritual, one does not readily as- sociate them with angels, as my Lord of Wimborne knew only too well. It was clear, then, that no supernatural hypothesis would be proposed, or accepted, to explain a circumstance that, at the very longest, must become familiar in the ears of men when the Welsh bishop should re- THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 223 turn from his holiday. And the Bishop of Wimborne grew more abjectly miserable, the more he thought about it. Confession he could not bring himself to contemplate, while what he had done should remain undiscov- ered, brief though that interval might be, and denial of his passive sin of that day would avail him nothing when discovery at last came, should he attempt it. Denial would be useless, indeed, when, some dark day, he should be summoned before the Archbishop of Canterbury. For a little while he thought of flight to some indef- inite region, where primates cease from troubling, and bishops are at rest. Then, by a very natural process of thought, since no such desired refuge was to be found, so far as he knew, this side of the grave, the idea of suicide was suggested to him. But so extreme a step as this, that would carry him at once beyond the jurisdiction of the Primate of all England was not to be seriously entertained for long. So far as he could recall, no bishop of the Anglican faith 224 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT had ever sought such an escape from his perplexities, however great, and the Bishop of Wimborne was too staunch a churchman to disregard precedent in matters of impor- tance. To be sure, his sitting in the seat of the Welsh prelate was without a pre- cedent, in post-Reformation days, at any rate, but that had not been a matter wholly of his own will, for he had, so to speak, been forced into it. And this thought brought him around to the beginning of his troubled self-communings. What was he to do ? As a matter of fact, he did nothing, so far as immediate escape from his dilemma was concerned. He went down to his Dorset see by train the next morning, with epis- copal dignity of the intensest kind radiating, as it were, from his entire person, glancing off from his apron, indeed, and reflected upward from his polished boots. The por- ters ran by twos and threes to grasp his luggage, when he alighted at the Wimborne station, and the station-master touched his cap with two deeply deferential fingers, when THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 225 the bishop passed him, with some word of gracious inquiry. And as the prelate got into his carriage, awaiting him at the rear of the station, he wondered how long it would be before these same fingers of defer- ence would become fingers of scorn ; how long before the obsequious porters and the boy at the book-stall would be making free with his name. That evening he and his chaplain drew up an outline of the next episcopal visitation to be made in the diocese, a most compre- hensive one indeed, since not a single parish was omitted from it. " It will take just four months to make the tour," observed the chaplain, as he jotted down the last date ; " that's a long time." " A long time, indeed," echoed his su- perior, thinking the while how small was the probability of its being completed before the falling sword should cut short his use- fulness in mid-career. When the chaplain had gone the bishop sat by his study fire till long past midnight. 226 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT Larkins, the butler, had made more than one errand into the room, ostensibly to see if his lordship wished anything, but in reality to indicate by his presence that it was time to close the house, and that, in his opinion, his master had much better go to bed, and let other people do the same. At last, to his great relief, he heard the bishop close the study door, and saw him go up the stairs, holding his silver candlestick peril- ously aslant in his preoccupation. " And 'igh time, indeed, for 'im to go," was Larkins's half-audible comment, as he closed the shutters, and covered the fire. The bishop slept but little that night, and came down to breakfast looking so worn and old that Larkins shook a sympathetic head in the depths of his pantry, as one who foresaw his master's speedy departure from the scene of his earthly labours. As he went below stairs he confided his dismal forebodings to the cook and her satellites, and enjoyed in mournful fashion the conse- quent gloom that overspread the establish- THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 227 ment. When he returned to the breakfast- room with the letters just come from the post, the bishop's hand trembled, as he took them from the tray, and Larkins noted the fact as a confirmation of his fears. " 'E's a-breakin' up fast," was the butler's next communication below stairs. " 'E'll last the day out, won't 'ee, Mr. Lar- kins ? " queried the head gardener, who did not like Larkins. But that functionary scorned to reply. There was nothing alarming in any of the communications that reached the bishop at breakfast-time. The mine had not yet ex- ploded. But, as the bishop awaited the explosion on that day, and on the days that followed, he almost wished it had taken place, and judgment had been meted out to him. The scorn and contempt of men could scarcely be harder to endure than present existence in dread of what the next moment might disclose. And yet, the end of each evening brought with it a sense of relief, that till the morrow, at least, he was 228 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT secure ; that for some eight hours more, at shortest, the shadow could not fall across his name. And thus the days went on in the palace at Wimborne. Six weeks after the Wimborne prelate had personated the Bishop of St. Asaph, in the House of Lords, the real head of that Flintshire see returned from abroad, no word having reached him meanwhile of his having been represented in Parliament, on a certain occasion, by one of his brethren of the episcopate. Coming directly up to London from Harwich, where he had landed from the Antwerp steamer, he was formally inducted into his seat among the lords spir- itual a day or two later. The Bishop of Carlisle was not present on this occasion, and neither were my Lords of Ely, Nor- wich, Lichfield, and Peterborough, who had been in attendance when the Pretender, as he might have been called, was there. No one, therefore, remarked upon this as the second appearance in Parliament of the Bishop of St. Asaph. When, in course THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 22Q of time, the four prelates already named saw their Welsh contemporary in his proper place among the lords spiritual, they had quite forgotten that his like had been seen there before. The Bishop of Carlisle, we may be sure, would not have forgotten, but he never resumed his place in the House of Lords. Having been taken ill soon after his meeting with the Bishop of Wimborne, he had died within the month following. But his death removed no load from the mind of the Bishop of Wimborne, who could not know that the secret, such as it was, had perished with the Cumberland prel- ate, for my Lord of Wimborne considered it not at all unlikely that some word of what had happened had been conveyed to the Welsh bishop by the late diocesan of Carlisle. The weight that oppressed the soul of the spiritual overseer of Wimborne would have been instantly lifted had he known that in reality he had not sat, for a moment even, in the place of the Welshman. On entering the House of Lords with the Bishop of 230 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT Carlisle, the latter, knowing that his com- panion, the supposed Bishop of St. Asaph, had not been formally inducted into a seat, and that while the debate then in progress should continue the needful formalities of such an induction could not take place, had therefore taken care to place the newcomer in what, to an unaccustomed eye, would have seemed part and parcel of the bishop's domain, but was actually outside of it. Then, not to leave the supposed Welsh bishop alone, he had sat beside him as a visiting prelate, not as a voting member. But of all this the Bishop of Wimborne, whose colonial life had removed him from contact with English usages, was profoundly ignorant. He had allowed himself to be passed off as the Bishop of St. Asaph, and, as we have seen, supposed himself to have occu- pied that prelate's rightful seat among the lords spiritual in Parliament assembled. Even across his most miserable moments since a certain fierce thrill of joy had flitted, remembering that he had sat in the House THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 231 of Lords, as one of that noble assemblage. Greatly as it would have relieved him to know that his alarm was needless, that there was no sword to fall, no mine to explode, with this relief would have been blent a dis- appointment almost as keen, on learning that his guilty exaltation of soul had been based on a mistake of his own, and that he had not sat in the House of Lords as one of its spiritual peers. Six months after the Bishop of Wimborne returned to his diocese, with his peace of mind for ever destroyed, he met the Bishop of St. Asaph, who was much impressed by the outward resemblance between himself and the Dorset prelate. " You might very easily pass yourself off for me, I should fancy," he remarked to the Bishop of Wimborne, who could not repress a little shiver of apprehension. The voice was somewhat stern, and so, it seemed to the listener, was the gaze that the Welshman bent upon him. Had the fatal moment come at last ? 232 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT " If I should ever be wanted in the House of Lords when I could not conveniently go, I shall certainly try to persuade you to go in my place," went on the other, still full of the fact of the resemblance. The Dorset prelate never knew what an- swer he made to this, for his head seemed to be in a whirl. Had his punishment at the hands of the Welshman begun ? The dioc- esan of St. Asaph said no more, but the other remains very sure that the whole mis- erable story of the imposture is known to the holder of the Flintshire see, at least. It is a cruel revenge that the Welshman is taking, thinks the Wimborne prelate, at the same time that he admits its justice. Some day it will be brought to a climax, for the other surely will not care to keep his victim in the toils of suspense for the rest of his life. The word must some day be spoken that will sever the hair that holds the sword suspended above the head of the Dorset diocesan, that will fire the fuse of the mine beneath his feet. THE DISCONTENTED BISHOP 233 And the persistent prayer of the Bishop of Wimborne is that he may die before that word is said. NOTE. That the writer has taken liberties with the internal arrangements of the House of Lords, he is well aware, and can only plead the exigences of the situation in excuse. And, indeed, if a writer may not now and then change the actual location of architectural details to suit his purposes, remove a stair, or add a gallery, if, in de- tails like these, he is to be held strictly to actual facts, what becomes of his freedom of action, we should like to know? THE SERIOUS DILEMMA OF THE BISHOP OF OKLAHO THE SERIOUS DILEMMA OF THE BISHOP OF OKLAHO TO be conspicuously good-looking, and while still on the sunny side of forty to have reached the haven of the episcopate, is surely to have been favoured of fortune above the majority of one's fellows. But thus favoured, indeed, was the Bishop of Oklaho, who was only thirty-eight, and had been known for three years as the hand- somest member of the American House of Bishops. And as a rule bishops are comely to look upon. How much of this comeliness is inherent in their office, it might be hard to determine. Some very plain-featured rectors have become, if not precisely beautiful, at least wonderfully imposing in aspect after 237 238 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT their enrollment among the bishops. The diocesan of Oklaho, however, had been noted as a handsome man while he was yet the spiritual ruler of a small country parish only. Elderly and cynical members of the General Convention (of the lower house, of course) had been heard to assert that the Bishop of Oklaho 's elevation to the episcopate was due solely to the fact of his handsome features ; but this assertion must have been coloured by personal bitterness. For it is quite cer- tain that, until standing committees admit women delegates to their deliberations, we need not expect that the beauty of any candi- date will have controlling weight in the nomination of a bishop. But to whatever circumstance the Bishop of Oklaho owed his election, that he was well fitted for his office no one attempted to deny. He was an untiring worker, a preacher of unusual eloquence, and, what was of prime importance, the possessor of a charm of manner which never failed of disarming opposition to his faith in localities where SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 239 the Episcopal Church was known only by unfriendly and vague report. In the third year after his consecration as bishop, he was called upon to perform other duties than those relating to the ad- ministration of affairs in his own diocese. The Bishop of Saginaw had just died, and the Bishop of Oklaho was asked to under- take a confirmation tour planned by the late bishop shortly before his death. It was while engaged in this work that he visited Port Huron to hold a confirmation. Much had been heard in the little city concerning the handsome bishop and his eloquent sermons. On the Sunday morning of his visitation, Christ Church was filled by a congregation made up not only of its own members but of strangers from other places of worship. There were present even some of her Majesty's loyal subjects from Sarnia and Fort Edward across the river. As the bishop entered the chancel, follow- ing the choristers and the rector, there was a rustle among the pews which expressed 240 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT admiration just as unmistakably as if it had been put into words and displayed before each seat in letters a foot high. The bishop detected the rustle as he passed on to his chair within the sanctuary, and knew exactly how to interpret it. And being human, it did not displease him that such a ripple of sound should spread itself over a congrega- tion upon his appearance. The rector interpreted the rustle correctly, likewise, and being quite as human as the bishop, and far less amiable, it was not pleasant for him to remember that no such gratifying murmur had ever attended his own entrance into the chancel. Rectors who look upon themselves as bishops in embryo are sometimes forgetful of the very wide distance between bishops in posse and bishops de facto. When morning prayer was over, and the choristers, a little fluttered with their un- usual exertions (for they had lifted up their voice as the storm wind for intensity), were recovering from their flight into the em- SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 24! pyrean, the confirmation followed in due form. Then the bishop, after a few words of advice to the candidates before him, entered the pulpit, and the congregation settled itself comfortably- back among the pew cushions, prepared to be moved howso- ever the reverend preacher should ordain. The Canadian contingent present were pleased to note that the bishop followed the Anglican custom of prefacing the sermon by a short prayer in the pulpit, but the rest were a little disturbed at the trifling depar- ture from what they were used to. A moment later the circumstance was forgotten. When the prayer was ended the bishop began his text with the words : " If we say that we have no sin " and at this point raised his eyes and looked out upon his audience. As he did so those in the pews saw him start slightly, as if surprised at something, and then followed a long and singular pause, during which the bishop stood looking straight before him. The rector, who from his seat in the chancel 242 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT could not see the face of the bishop, as- sumed that the pause was being made for rhetorical effect, and made an inward com- ment thereon not overcomplimentary to his superior; but those who noted the colour fleet back and forth over the bishop's coun- tenance passed no such judgment. The silence had grown almost painful when it was broken by the bishop's voice once more announcing his text, and no trace of agitation showed itself in the quiet, even tones. " If we say that we have no sin we de- ceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us; but if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." The sermon upon this theme was very much unlike those to which Port Huron was accustomed to listen, and even the choir- boys hearkened on this occasion. The bishop spoke as men speak who are intensely in earnest. Mediocrity becomes respectable when the speaker is impressed with his SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 243 theme, but when eloquence is touched with the crowning quality of intense sincerity, its utterance becomes inspiration. And the bishop appeared like one inspired while he faced his audience that morning. After the sermon was over, if the singular preparatory pause was recalled, it was at- tributed to some momentary indisposition by most of those present. But the rector did not thus account for it, and being as impervious to sermons as most clergymen grow to be in time, he gave only critical and hostile attention to the present one. There was one other listener who did not interpret the pause as the congregation had done, but placed no uncharitable construction upon it. In that pause this listener realised that the Bishop of Oklaho had suddenly come face to face with his nearly forgotten past. " The church appeared very full to-day," observed the prelate, blandly, as he walked home to dinner with the rector after service. " Yes," returned the other, with that little show of cynicism observable in clergymen 244 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT turned of fifty who have not attained dis- tinction, " yes, it was. A confirmation brings every one out." The sharp note did not escape the bishop's notice. He had recognised it in the voices of other clergymen on similar occasions, and it amused him a little. Yet to all appear- ance he ignored its existence, and went on placidly with what he had in mind. " I fancied some of the people might have been from the Canadian side." " So they were," answered the rector ; " at least twenty or thirty of them. One was that rather good-looking woman sitting in the last seat but one on the left of the middle aisle. She had her son with her, a boy of about fifteen. You may have observed her, for strangers are apt to ask who she is, I find." " I think I do remember seeing some such person as you describe," said the bishop, indifferently. " Is she anybody in particu- lar?" " No one knows very much about her," SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 245 was the rector's response. " She is a widow who has lived ten years or more at Fort Edward, and who, I hear, is much liked by her neighbours. Her name is Eccleston, and I have come to know her slightly from her occasional attendance at my church. But here we are at the rectory." In the afternoon, as the bishop was taking a quiet walk by himself along the river- side, and thereby somewhat scandalising the Baptist parson, observing the prelate from his window, he was met by the boy of whose mother the rector had spoken in the morn- ing. " You are the bishop, are you not, sir ? " said the lad, a little timidly, as he raised his hat. " They call me one," returned the digni- tary, smiling. There was a strong likeness between the two as they stood together on the river bank looking toward Lake Huron. One might have almost taken them for brothers. The bishop appeared not a day over thirty- 246 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT five, while the lad, though but fifteen, was tall, and looked several years older than that. " My mother wished me to say, if I saw you," said the younger, " that she would be glad if you could find time to call upon her before you leave Port Huron, for she once knew you, she says. Our name is Eccles- ton, and we live over across the river, between Fort Edward and Sarnia." " I leave for Chicago to-morrow morning," said the bishop; "but I have an hour or two of leisure this afternoon. Perhaps you will kindly conduct me to your mother's house," he added; and they walked to the ferry together. The boy's message was not wholly unex- pected. When his eyes met those of Mrs. Eccleston, as he was announcing his text, the bishop had felt that some such summons was not unlikely to follow ; and since then he had been thinking of little else. Long years before, when he was not a bishop at all, was not in deacon's orders SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 247 even, but was merely a worldly, lively under- graduate at Harvard University, he had met for the first time the woman he was now going to see. She was then the daughter of a small shopkeeper in Boston, and her face had taken his fancy when he first en- tered her father's shop. Soon he came to know her well. When he strove to please, no one had ever been proof against his persuasive manner, either when he was Har- vard student or as right reverend bishop; and for weeks and months he devoted a great deal of time to pleasing Helen South- wick. The angular rector of Port Huron, whose past was assuredly ascetic enough to satisfy any Puritan divine, would have recoiled from the Bishop of Oklaho as from Mephistophe- les himself had he known more of his guest's early years. The young undergraduate had most assuredly been in love after a care- less fashion, and Helen had been in love also in a fashion that was not care- less. 248 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT Time had passed, and he had taken his degree in June. Early in the following autumn they were to be married, he had told her. Very early in July he had sailed for Europe with his mother, to be gone six weeks. On his return there was to be a quiet wedding at the Southwicks', and then he would take her to his own home in Con- necticut. It was not a very wise plan that he had made, and to most persons it would have seemed very vague as to important details ; but it did not seem so to Helen or her father. As for the contriver of it, he fully meant to carry it out, and trust to time to reconcile his people to his marriage. Helen's face would bring about this result, he argued with himself. There came one or two letters from him to the little shop in Boston, but at the end of the six weeks he had not returned, nor did the autumn bring him, either. It was after the lapse of more than a year that he came back, and then he heard in a vague, indirect fashion that Helen was dead, and SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 249 that her father had gone from Boston, no one knew whither. Absence and new and multiplied experiences had left those few months of the year before but dimly out- lined in his memory; and since Helen was dead it was comparatively easy to forget, almost, that she had ever lived. A year or two afterward, in obedience to more serious impulses than he had ever felt before, he had entered the General Theo- logical Seminary in New York, and Helen Southwick thereafter became only the rarest tenant of his thoughts, the occasional theme of a regretful musing over the past. But when from the pulpit of Christ Church he recognised the face of the woman he had supposed long dead, he knew that he saw her and no other. That long pause at which the rector had sneered as theatrical was filled for the bishop with the events of sixteen years before. And now he was going to see the woman whom he had once loved in his way ; the woman he had deserted. To the boy beside 250 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT him he seemed the impersonation of seren- ity, but he was very far from being at peace just then. After they had gone on board the ferry- boat, the bishop, who, in spite of his pre- occupation, had been interested in what the boy was saying of the various objects in sight, was led to look more closely at his companion. As he did so something caused him to flush and pale as he had done in the morning. " I hope you are not ill," said the boy, anxiously. " It is only a slight attack of dizziness," the other replied, after a moment. " It is quite gone now." " I am glad of that," said the boy, as they left the rail where they had been standing and moved to a seat near. " I should be very sorry to think you were really ill." "Why so, my boy? You have never seen me before," said the bishop, lightly. " I know that, but " and the speaker hesitated. SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 251 " But what ? " asked the other, encourag- ingly. " I know you will think me foolish. I am sure you will, but it's the truth, all the same. I I like you. I did when I first saw you in church, and when my mother said she used to know you, and sent me to ask you to come and see her, I was so glad," con- cluded the boy, hurrying his words together impulsively. The bishop laid his hand kindly on young Eccleston's shoulder. The lad flushed with pleasure, but neither spoke for some mo- ments. Eccleston saw that he had not displeased the bishop, who for his part was recalling his boyhood, when his heart used to go out toward those he fancied in sudden impulses of affection. But a certain some- thing implied by this similarity of tempera- ment was not altogether satisfactory to him. Bishops may have their bad quarter- hours as well as shepherds of less exalted stature, or even as unsanctified laymen have. 252 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT " It is always pleasant to be liked," he said, breaking the silence at length, " and I trust we shall know each other better in the future. But you must talk to me now about yourself and your mother, whom I have not seen since I was a very young man. Your father, I conclude, is not living." " No, he is not, or at least I do not think so. I never saw him, and my mother says she has not heard of him at all for ever so many years. After my grandfather died we came here from Toronto, and I have never known any other home. Perhaps you knew my father. I often wonder how he looked." " I think you must resemble him," replied the bishop, "for you don't look like your mother." The two had landed from the ferry-boat some moments before this, and very soon came to Mrs. Eccleston's. The boy, after showing the bishop into the house, excused himself in order to summon his mother. The bishop sat quietly in the little parlour where the boy had left him, his elbow resting on SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 253 the table beside him, and his hand shading his eyes. Birds were calling to each other among the honeysuckles outside the open windows, but he heard neither their notes nor the footsteps of some one approaching. It crossed his mind at that moment how the rector of Port Huron might wonder to see him there. " Ernest," said a voice that for sixteen years he had thought silent for ever, " Ernest, it is I." He rose confusedly, and faced the woman he had loved and left so long ago. In do- ing so he speedily forgot the ascetic rector across the river. The same woman, but not the same. The Helen Southwick of his remembrance was slight of figure and shy in manner, and her beauty had seemed of a fleeting or at least an ethereal kind. " The woman that now met, unshrinking, his gaze, Seemed to bask in the silent but sumptuous haze Of that soft second summer, more ripe than the first, Which returns when the bud to the blossom hath burst." 254 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT But the beauty of maturity had not effaced or obscured certain well-remembered charac- teristics of Helen's young womanhood, else he had not known so quickly whose eyes were meeting his from the far end of the church that very morning. " Helen ! " exclaimed the visitor, as he took her extended hand. " I never thought to find you here. I had thought " "Yes, I know," she interposed, gently. " You thought that I was dead, as I intended you should when you thought of me at all. Until I saw you at church I had no knowl- edge of you. I had not thought of you as a bishop, Ernest." The man before her winced at these last words, as she saw. " Pardon me, Ernest," she added. " I did not mean to wound. I had never heard of your return to America, and had come to fancy you might still be in Europe. Tell me," she continued, " did you like him ? " " Like him ? " repeated the other, ques- tioningly. SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 255 " I mean my boy, your son, who brought you to me," was the answer, very quietly given. Although the Bishop of Oklaho had been in a measure prepared for this ever since that close scrutiny of the lad's features on the ferry-boat, yet now that the fact was announced by Helen, it came upon him with almost as great a shock as if he had not been telling himself since that moment that it must be so. He groaned inwardly. " He is very like you in some ways," went on the woman's calm tones, "and I have trained him to be manly and noble. As your acknowledged son, even, he never would shame you by want of breeding, I think." " I am sure of that, Helen," said the bishop, looking at her, and then the two sat for some moments in a silence which the woman was the first to break. " Perhaps you are wondering, Ernest, why I have sent for you. There were two reasons for it, one affecting you, the other myself. 256 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT I feared after this morning's recognition that you might imagine I should urge claims against you in the future, might make my- self your enemy, in fact. I wanted you to know that nothing was farther from my intention, that I had no desire to exercise a disturbing influence in your life. I might have written all this, it is true, but because I am a woman I longed to speak with you once more. I wished that my boy should speak with you, too, although he will never know that you are his father;" and there was just a shade of quivering in the voice of the speaker here. The bishop, who was feeling very little like a bishop at this moment, bent his head lower and lower as he listened. Had Helen, then, no least word of reproach for his deser- tion of her? Her implied forgiveness was more bitter than any accusation she could have made, and cut more deeply into his soul. " Then, too, there was another reason," she resumed, her tones quite firm now. " I SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 257 wanted to say to you, in case you had ever felt as if you had caused my ruin, that it was a mistaken fear, and that you need not be troubled by any remorse. I preferred to say this rather than write to you, lest by any chance the letter should fall under eyes other than yours. Soon after you saw me last we moved from Boston, and later my father had it reported that I was dead. Then in Toronto we began a new life. I took my mother's name of Eccleston, and passed for a young widow who had returned to her father's home. Then my boy was born, and, on my father's death two or three years later, my son and I came here, where we have since lived very happily, and, I have reason to believe, respected by our neighbours." The bishop had raised his head by this time. " Helen," he cried, when she had finished, " I certainly proved myself all unworthy of you in those far-off days. I am unworthy of you still, but such as I am," and here he thought of his episcopal honours half 258 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT with pride and half with shame, " such as I am, will you not take me and let the rest of my life be spent in atoning, so far as atonement is possible, for the wrong of the past?" She shook her head sadly. " Do you know what you ask ? " she queried. " Do you know, do you realise at all what such a step involves?" " Not the faintest shadow need touch you, Helen," he answered, " if that is what you fear. Your past and mine need never be questioned. We might write to each other for a time, and then, in a few months, have a quiet wedding, after which I would take you and the boy to my home." " But I am not thinking of myself," she exclaimed. " It is of you ; " and as she spoke the lad passed before the open window. "Ernest," she resumed, when the boy had gone from hearing, "don't you see how nearly he resembles you ? Would not that single fact raise a scandal at once, if you were seen to visit me here often? It SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 259 would follow you to Oklaho as well. The truth would be surmised very soon, and then it might be said that I had hunted you out, and forced you to marry me. And what would your clergy say of you, or to you ? And how could you place matters in a way to satisfy them ? Ernest, I would die sooner than bring this disgrace upon you." Yes, the Bishop of Oklaho saw it all now. That young face, so like his own, would tell the truth, and even more than the truth, to all the world if he were now to marry Helen. And yet his old love for her had returned as he sat there. No, not that. It was not a return of that careless, easy affection of his youth that he now felt, but a new emo- tion, in which was a strange mingling of remorse and reverential love. Blended with it, too, was a yearning tenderness for his son. Why need a dread of the world's com- ments and misinterpretations hinder him from doing the right thing now? Surely he and Helen could be very happy, and to 260 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT the boy he would gladly supply the place of the father the lad had never known, if only if only what? He rose and paced the floor, and Helen read his every thought, and pitied him. "You see, don't you?" she said, gently. " You must see all that your proposed settle- ment of the matter would bring with it. Scandal would be quite as busy with your name as with mine. There would be end- less discussions about you among your clergy in Oklaho. The other bishops would likewise talk you over, and perhaps it might happen that you would lose your office in the church." " I could not be deposed from my posi- tion for a sin committed before my entrance into the ministry, a sin, too, which I had repented of and atoned for as far as pos- sible," repeated the bishop, slowly, and as if the words hurt him in the saying. " Of course you know best about all that," she responded; "but could you en- dure to have it said that the Bishop of SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 26 1 Oklaho had married in order to legitimise his son ? " At this sternly truthful putting of the matter, the diocesan of Oklaho shuddered. How hard it all seemed ! " No, of course you could not," she went on, answering her own question. " Then why place yourself in a position to have it said of you ? " " Better have this said of me than have it known that I had a son that I would not acknowledge," murmured the bishop, but she did not seem to heed, for she con- tinued : " My boy and I are happy here. We have enough to support us comfortably, and now that you and I have met, and under- stand each other, we can go our own ways as before. Had I not perceived that you recognised me this morning, I should never have sent for you, nor let you know of my existence. But since we have met once more, you will know that my feelings toward you are only the most friendly ones." 262 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT " But listen to me, Helen," exclaimed the other. " The matter must not end thus. I can resign my bishopric. Then we can marry and live where no one has ever heard of me. I can do this whenever you will consent to marry me. Ah, Helen, think what a happy future there may be for the three of us in some other country than this." But he did not say " I will? only " I can? and this she noticed. Just then the lad returned to the house, and entered the room where they were. " Do you know, mother," he began, after the conversation had become general, " some- thing so odd happened just now. Mason, the carpenter down the road, saw me with the bishop on the ferry-boat, and, meeting me a few moments ago, asked who he was, and said I looked enough like him to be his son. It was a queer thing to say, but I fancy it was all because my hair is like yours," he added, turning toward his moth- er's guest, as he spoke. "The man was not so far wrong," re- SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 263 marked the bishop, after a pause, "for I think you do look like me, my boy." Mrs. Eccleston said nothing, but the boy blushed with pleasure again, not only by reason of what had been said, but because of the lingering tenderness he detected in the voice that had called him " my boy." In a few moments the bishop arose to take leave, and asked the lad to accompany him to the ferry. While the boy was absent from the room in search of his hat, the bishop said, in a low tone : " Helen, I cannot consent to let you and the boy go out of my life." " But you must, Ernest," she answered, sadly. " No," he pleaded, " I must not. You will see me again before I leave Port Huron for Chicago on my way to Oklaho. And then you must tell me that you will consent." " Do not come," she began, and then the boy joined them. As the bishop and his companion went on to the ferry, the former exerted himself 264 THE ARCHBISHOP S UNGUARDED MOMENT to the utmost in talk to please the young fellow by his side, and when they parted, the latter said, timidly, yet not without de- cision : " I am sure that you are the best man I have ever known, and I am going to try to be like you in everything." What reply could the right reverend shep- herd make to this ? And how could the lad know that his words pierced like a sword the ' heart of the man before him, the man whom he so adored ? Involuntarily his hearer recalled a passage read long ago, and little heeded then; but now its full meaning was revealed as by a flash of lightning : " There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration. They bind us over to rectitude and purity by their pure belief about us, and our sins become that worst kind of sacrilege which tears down the invisible altar of trust." As the boat moved away, the bishop said SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 265 to the boy, " We shall meet again," but he did not add " to-morrow." In the evening the diocesan of Oklaho preached again at Port Huron. From the pulpit he saw his son gazing at him from a far-off pew, with adoring eyes, but Helen was not there. As usual, the bishop spoke with but few notes, and on this occasion chose for his text the words : " Thou hast set our misdeeds before thee, and our se- cret sins in the light of thy countenance." Upon this theme he delivered a sermon stronger even than that of the morning. Persuasion, entreaty, warning, command, all were blended in one masterful tide of eloquence. He besought his hearers to take home to themselves the thought that they could have no secrets from the Lord. From the dark background of the pulpit the fair face of the bishop, with the gaslight falling full upon it, shone out like that of some pitying angel, as he cried out, beseech- ingly: " Oh, beloved, do not say to yourselves, 266 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT ' The past is past, there is no use meddling with that. It is quite enough if we hence- forth live soberly and honestly, and at peace with all men.' I beg of you not to drug your consciences with any such shameful nepenthe as that. While one sinful act of the past remains unatoned for by such ad- mission of it on your part as will prevent in any degree its bitter fruitage, and right, as far as may be, what was done amiss until all this is done by you, the act does not belong to your past. It remains your sin of the present moment." Lower and lower sank the speaker's voice as he neared the close, but still each syllable might be heard distinctly throughout the church, till he ended with words that smote the ear like the awful utterances of remorse- less fate : " The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to scourge us." The service over, bishop and rector re- turned to the rectory, the former on the plea SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 267 of fatigue going at once to his room, glad to be alone. From his window he could see the glitter of the lights on the Canadian shore, and the coloured lamps of the ferry- boat sliding back and forth across the river like some gigantic shuttle. But these were not needed to remind him of Helen and her boy over on the opposite shore where the lights glittered so bravely. His boy as well as hers ! Why should he not claim this son of his before all the world, and act a father's part toward him henceforth ? Had he not just been telling his hearers to face the con- sequences of their evil doing and to set the crooked straight ? " Lest by any means, after that I have preached to others, I myself should become a castaway," he repeated to himself as he stood by the window. In the room below the rector was remark- ing rather severely to his wife that for his part he felt that entirely too young men were now being raised to the episcopate, and that sound learning and gravity of deport- 268 THE ARCHBISHOP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT ment were made of very little account in the Church nowadays, so far as his imperfect vision extended. To this his wife made no reply, being a woman of great discretion ; but she knew very well what was the imme- diate cause of her husband's gloomy views regarding the decline of the episcopate. The much envied bishop above stairs was meanwhile longing for the night to be over, that he might return to Fort Edward and say to Helen that he was ready to give up everything for her sake and the boy's, and take them both to some distant place where no one could know anything of their past. But was he ready ? To go now to Helen with this proposal, and gain her acceptance of it, meant that he must sacrifice much that was very sweet to him. Name as well as country must be changed. Perhaps even in some remote place the story of his youth, dis- torted and exaggerated, might follow them and sully the fair name of his wife. It might some day come to the knowledge of his son and cause him to turn from the SERIOUS DILEMMA OF BISHOP OF OKLAHO 269 man he now revered. Of what avail, then, the sacrifice of present honours and dig- nities ? The setting right in the case would prove a mockery only, a miserable failure. But, again, how could he remain longer in his office ? He who had once brought shame upon a woman still living, he who was the father of an illegitimate son? What hypocrisy could equal this? And he thought, with a great yearning, of the beautiful woman who had forgiven him because she loved him, and of the boy who adored him, the boy who was his son. The night passed and morning brought with it the necessity for prompt decision, for he knew that if he did not return to Helen this morning with the settled purpose of making her his wife at some definite period not far removed, it would be useless to look for her consent at a later time after weeks of indecision. To take the morning train for Chicago meant for them both the maintenance of things as they were. To remain till after- 270 THE ARCHBISHOPS UNGUARDED MOMENT noon meant the fulfilment of his promise made to Helen sixteen years before, the carrying out in the near future of yester- day's proposal. Now had come the supreme moment of choice. Hesitation was no longer possible. Whatever course he adopted, there could be no looking back. Either way the decision must be final. The train which he had first planned to take was to leave at ten o'clock in the morn- ing. At twenty minutes before ten the bishop was still weighing consequences, while the rector was inquiring if he should go with him to the station. The train for Chicago left promptly on the stroke of ten, twenty minutes after the rector had asked his question. Did it leave without the bishop ? THE END. SELECTIONS FROM L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY'S LIST OF FICTION Selections from L+ C page and Company's List of fiction t* An Enemy to the King. (Twentieth Thousand.) From the Recently Discovered Memoirs of the Sieur de la Tournoire. By ROBERT NEILSON STE- PHENS. Illustrated by H. De M. Young. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth . . . $1.25 " Brilliant as a play ; it is equally brilliant as a romantic novel." Philadelphia Press. " Those who love chivalry, fighting, and intrigue will find it, and of good quality, in this book." -New York Critic. The Continental Dragoon. (Sixteenth A Romance of Philipse Manor House, in 1778. By ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS, author of " An En- emy to the King." Illustrated by H. C. Edwards. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth .... $1.50 " It has the sterling qualities of strong dramatic writing, and ranks among the most spirited and ably written historical romances of the season. An impulsive appre- ciation of a soldier who is a soldier, a man who is a man, a hero who is a hero, is one of the most captivating of Mr. Stephens's charms of manner and style." Boston Herald. The Road to Paris. (Sixth Thousand.) By ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS, author of "An Enemy to the King," "The Continental Dragoon," etc. Illustrated by H. C. Edwards. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth $1.50 "Vivid and picturesque in style, well conceived and full of action, the novel is abwbing from cover to cover." - Philadelphia Public Ledger . " In the line of historical romance, few books of the season will equal Robert Nwlwm Stephens's < The Road to Paris.' " Cincinnati Times-Star. LIST OF FICTION. A Gentleman Player. His Adventures on a Secret Mission for Queen Elizabeth. By ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS, author of "An Enemy to the King," "The Continental Dragoon," "The Road to Paris," etc. Illustrated by Frank T. Merrill. i vol., lib. i2mo, cloth, 450 pages $1.50 " A Gentleman Player " is a romance of the Elizabethan period. It relates the story of a young gentleman who, in the reign of Eliza- beth, falls so low in his fortune that he joins Shakespeare's company of players, and becomes a friend and protege of the great poet. Throughout the course of his adventures the hero makes use of his art as an actor and his skill as a swordsman, and the denouement of the plot is brought about by means of a performance by Shakespeare's company of a play in an inn yard. Rose a Charlitte. (Ei g m Thousand.) An Acadien Romance. By MARSHALL SAUNDERS, author of " Beautiful Joe," etc. Illustrated by H. De M. Young. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth $1.50 " A very fine novel we unhesitatingly pronounce it ... one of the books that stamp themselves at once upon the imagination and remain imbedded in the memory long after the covers are closed." Literary World, Boston. Deficient Saints. A Tale of Maine. By MARSHALL SAUNDERS, author of "Rose a Charlitte," "Beautiful Joe," etc. Illus- trated by Frank T. Merrill. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth, 400 pages $1.50 In this story Marshall Saunders follows closely the fortunes of a French family whose history is bound up with that of the old Pine- tree State. These French people become less and less French until, at last, they are Americans, intensely loyal to their State and their country. Although " Deficient Saints " is by no means a historical novel, frequent references are made to the early romantic history of Maine. L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY^ Her Sailor. ( A Novel By MARSHALL SATJNDERS, author of Rose a Charlitte," " Beautiful Joe," etc. Illustrated. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth, 250 pages $1.25 A story of modern life of great charm and pathos, dealing with the love affairs of a Canadian girl and a naval officer. Midst the Wild Carpathians, By MAURUS JOKAI, author of "Black Diamonds," "The Lion of Janina," etc. Authorized translation by R. Nisbet Bain. Illustrated by J. W. Kennedy. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth 51.25 "The story is absorbingly interesting ad displays all the virility of Jokai's powers, bis genius of description, Ins keenness of chaiaueriiatioa. his subtlety of tamer and Sis ........... !! art i the P.UR.CUJO. of the novtl fn. one apparent climax to another." Cku*f Evemmg fast. Pretty Michal. A Romance of Hungary. By MAURUS JOKAI, author of "Black Diamonds," "The Green Book," "Midst the Wild Carpathians," etc. Authorized translation by R. Nisbet Bain. Illustrated with a photogravure frontispiece of the great Magyar writer. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth decorative, 325 pages $1.50 It is at owe a spirited tale of ' border chivalry/ a cfaanniiig Urns story full of - * ** -^ In Kings' Houses. A Romance of the Reign of Queen Anne. By JULIA C. R. DORR, author of " A Cathedral Pilgrim- age," etc. Illustrated by Frank T. MerrflL I vol., lib. I2mo, cloth . . . . $i.= n We dow the book with a wish that the other nay write man romance of tf -. history of England which she knows so wen." AM*OTK, Item Yrh. is a relief to COM VDOB. Related w LIST OF FICTION. Manders. A Tale of Paris. By ELWYN BARRON. Illustrated, i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth, 350 pages . . $1.50 " Bright descriptions of student life in Paris, sympathetic views of human frailty, and a dash of dramatic force, combine to form an attractive story. The book contains some very strong scenes, plenty of life and color, and a pleasant tinge of humor. ... It has grip, picturesqueness, and vivacity." The Speaker (London). " A study of deep human interest, in which pathos and humor both play their parts. The descriptions of life in the Quartier Latin are distinguished for their freshness and liveliness." St. James Gazette (.London). " A romance sweet as violets." Town Topics (New York). fly Lady's Honor. (/ Press.) A Romance. By WILSON BARRETT, author of " The Sign of the Cross," etc., and ELWYN BARRON, author of " Manders." Illustrated, i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth, 350 pages . . $1.50 A historical romance of great vigor and interest. The collabora- tion of Mr. Barrett with Mr. Barren, the successful author of " Man- ders," is a sufficient guarantee of the production of a volume of fiction which will take very high rank. Omar the Tentmaker. A Romance of Old Persia. By NATHAN HASKELL DOLE. Illustrated by F. T. Merrill, i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth . . . . $1.50 " The story itself is beautiful and it is beautifully written. It possesses the true spirit of romance, and is almost poetical in form. The author has undoubtedly been inspired by his admiration for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to write this story of which Omar is the hero." Troy Times. " Mr. Dole has built a delightful romance." Chicago Chronicle. " It is a strong and vividly written story, full of the life and spirit of romance." New Orleans Picayune. The Golden Dog. A Romance of Quebec. By WILLIAM KIRBY. New authorized edition. Illustrated by J. W. Kennedy. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth .... $1.25 " A powerful romance of love, intrigue, and adventure in the time of Louis XV. and Mme. de Pompadour, when the French colonies were making their great stru&gle to retain for an ungrateful court the fairest jewels in the colonial diadem of France." Ne*> York HertUd. L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY S The Making of a Saint. By W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM. Illustrated by Gil- bert James. i vol., lib. i2mo, cloth .... $1.50 " An exceedingly strong story of original motive and design. . . . The scenes are imbued with a spirit of frankness . . . and in addition there is a strong dramatic flavor." Philadelphia Press. " A sprightly tale abounding in adventures, and redolent of the spirit of mediaeval Italy."- Brooklyn Times. Friendship and Folly. A novel. By MARIA LOUISE POOL, author of "Dally," "A Redbridge Neighborhood," "In a Dike Shanty," etc. Illustrated by J. W. Kennedy, i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth .... $1.25 " The author handles her elements with skilful fingers fingers that feel their way most truthfully among the actual emotions and occurrences of nineteenth century romance. Hers is a frank, sensitive touch, and the result is both complete and full of interest." Boston Ideas. "The story will rank with the best previous work of this author." Indianapolis News. The Knight of King's Guard. A Romance of the Days of the Black Prince. By EWAN MARTIN. Illustrated by Gilbert James, i vol., lib. I2mp, cloth, 300 pages . . $1.50 An exceedingly well written romance, dealing with the romantic period chronicled so admirably by Froissart. The scene is laid at a border castle between England and Scotland, the city of London, and on the French battle-fields of Cressy and Poitiers. Edward the Third, Queen Philippa, the Black Prince, Bertrand du Guesclin, are all his- torical characters, accurate reproductions of which give life and vitality to the romance. The character of the hero is especially well drawn. The Rejuvenation of fliss Semaphore. A farcical novel. By HAL GODFREY. Illustrated by Etheldred B. Barry. I vol., lib. I2mo, cloth .... $1.25 charmed an amused world. It is well written, drawn to the life, and full of the most enjoyable humor." Boston Beacon. LIST OF FICTION. Cross Trails. By VICTOR WAITE. Illustrated by J. W. Kennedy. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth .... $1.50 " A Spanish-American novel of unusual interest, a brilliant, dashing, and stirring story, teeming with humanity and life. Mr. Waite is to be congratulated upon the strength with which he has drawn his characters." San Francisco Chronicle. " Every page is enthralling." A cademy. " Full of strength and reality." A thetueum. " The book is exceedingly powerful." Glasgow Herald. The Paths of the Prudent. By J. S. FLETCHER, author of "When Charles I. was King," " Mistress Spitfire," etc. Illustrated by J. W. Kennedy. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth, 300 pages . . $1.50 " The story has a curious fascination for the reader, and the theme and characters are handled with rare ability." Scotsman. " Dorinthia is charming. The story is told with great humor." Pall Mall Gazette. " An excellently well told story, and the reader's interest is perfectly sustained to the very end." Punch. Bijli the Dancer. By /AMES BLYTHE PATTON. Illustrated by Horace Van Rinth. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth .... $1.50 " A novel of Modern India. . . . The fortunes of the heroine, an Indian Nautch girl, are told with a vigor, pathos, and a wealth of poetic sympathy that makes the book admirable from first to last." Detroit Free Press. " A remarkable book." Bookman. " Powerful and fascinating." Pall Mall Gazette. " A vivid picture of Indian life." Academy (London). Drives and Puts. ( A Book of Golf Stories. By WALTER CAMP and LILLIAN BROOKS. Illustrated. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth decorative . $1.50 Considering the great and growing interest in golf, perhaps the king of sports, this volume, written by Walter Camp, the eminent authority on sports, in collaboration with Lillian Brooks, the well- known writer of short stories, is sure to be a success. 8 L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY'S " To Arms ! " Being Some Passages from the Early Life of Allan Oliphant, Chirurgeon, Written by Himself, and now Set Forth for the First Time. By ANDREW BALFOUR. Illustrated by F. W. Glover, i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth . . . . $1.50 " A tale of ' Bonnie Tweedside,' and St. Dynans and Auld Reekie, a fair picture of the country under misrule and usurpation and all kinds of vicissitudes. Allan Oli- phant is a great hero." Chicago Times-Herald. " A recital of thrilling interest, told with unflagging vigor." Globe. " An unusually excellent example of a semi-historic romance." World. The River of Pearls ; OR, THE RED SPIDER. (In Press.) A Chinese Romance. By RENE DE PONT-JEST, with sixty illustrations from original draw- ings by Felix Re"gamey. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth, 300 pages . . $1.50 Close acquaintance with the manners and customs of the Chinese has enabled the author to write a story which is instructive as well as interesting. The book, as a whole, shows the writer to be possessed of a strong descriptive faculty, as well as keen insight into the charac- ters of the people of whom he is writing. The plot is cleverly con- ceived and well worked out, and the story abounds with incidents of the most exciting and sensational character. Enjoyment of its perusal is increased by the powerful illustrations of Felix Regamey. The book may be read with profit by any one who wishes to real- ize the actual condition of native life in China. Frivolities. (/ Press.) Especially Addressed to Those who are Tired of being Serious. By RICHARD MARSH, author of " Tom Ossington's Ghost," etc. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth, 340 pages . . ' $1.50 A dozen stories in an entirely new vein for Mr. Marsh. The humor is irresistible, and carries the reader on breathlessly from one laugh to another. The style, though appealing to a totally different side of complex human nature, is as strong and effective as the author's intense and dramatic work in " Tom Ossington's Ghost." LIST OF FICTION. Via Lucis. By KASSANDRA VIVARIA. With portrait of the author. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth .... $1.50 " ' Via Lucis 'is we say it unhesitatingly a striking and interesting production." London A tkeneeum. " Without doubt the most notable novel of the summer is this strong story of Ital- ian life, so full of local color one can almost see the cool, shaded patios and the flame of the pomegranate blossom, and smell the perfume of the grapes growing on the hill- sides. It is a story of deep and passionate heart interests, of fierce loves and fiercer hates, of undisciplined natures that work out their own bitter destiny of woe. There has hardly been a finer piece of portraiture than that of the child Arduina, the child of a sickly and unloved mother and a cruel and vindictive father, a morbid, queer, lonely little creature, who is left to grow up without love or training of any kind." New Orleans Picayune. Lally of the Brigade. A Romance of the Irish Brigade in France during the Time of Louis the Fourteenth. By L. McMANus, author of "The Silk of the Kine," "The Red Star," etc. Illustrated. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth, 250 pages . . $1.25 The scene of this romance is partly at the siege of Crimona (held by the troops of Louis XIV.) by the Austrian forces under Prince Eugene. During the siege the famous Irish Brigade renders valiant service, and the hero a dashing young Irishman is in the thick of the fighting. He is also able to give efficient service in unravelling a political intrigue, in which the love affairs of the hero and the heroine are interwoven. Sons of Adversity. A Romance of Queen Elizabeth's Time. By L. COPE CORNFORD, author of " Captain Jacobus," etc. Illustrated by J. W. Kennedy. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth .... $1.25 " A tale of adventure on land and sea at the time when Protestant England arM Catholic Spain were struggling for naval supremacy. Spanish conspiracies apiiti t the peace of good Queen Bess, a vivid description of the raise of the Spanish sicce of Leyden by the combined Dutch and English forces, sea fights, the recovery <,l tiolcn treasure, are all skilfully woven elements in a plot of unusual strength." PMsimrg Bulletin. IO L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY S The Archbishop's Unguarded Moment. By OSCAR FAY ADAMS. Illustrated. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth decorative . . $1.25 Mr. Adams is well known as a writer of short stories. As the title indicates, these stories deal with dignitaries of the Episcopal Church. The mingled pathos and humor, which Mr. Adams has handled so admirably in describing his characters, make a book of more tha* average interest for the reader of fiction. Captain Fracasse. Translated from the French of Gautier. By ELLEN MURRAY BEAM. Illustrated by Victor A. Searles. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth .... $1.25 " The story is one of the best in romantic fiction, for upon it Gautitr lavished his rare knowledge of the twelfth century." San Francisco Ckronlflt. " One of those rare stories in which vitality is abundant." New York Htrald. The Count of Nideck. From the French of Erckmann-Chatrian, translated and adapted by RALPH BROWNING FISKE. Illustrated by Victor A. Searles. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth . . . $1.25 " ' The Count of Nideck,' adapted from .the French of Erckmann - Chatrian by Ralph Browning Fiske, is a most interesting tale, simply told, and moving with direct force to the end in view." Minneapolis Times. "Rapid in movement, it abounds in dramatic incident, furnishes graphic descrip- :ions of the locality and is enlivened with a very pretty love story.' Muriella; OR, LE SELVE. By OUIDA. Illustrated by M. B. Prendergast. i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth . . . . $1.25 " Ouida's literary style is almost perfect in ' Muriella.' " Chicago Times-Herald. "' Muriella' is an admirable example of the author's best work." Brooklyn Times. " It dwells in the memory, and bears the dramatic force, tragic interest, and skilful- ness of treatment that mark the work of Ouida when at her best." Pitisburs Bulletin. LIST OF FICTION. Bobbie McDuff. By CLINTON Ross, author of "The Scarlet Coat," " Zuleika," etc. Illustrated by B. West Clinedinst. i vol., large i6mo, cloth . . . . $1.00 " ' Bobbie McDuff,' by Clinton Ross, is a healthy romance, tersely and vigorously told." Louisville Courier-Journal. " It is full of mystery and as fascinating as a fairy tale." San Francisco Chronicle. " It is a well-written story, full of surprises and abounding in vivid interest." The Congregationalist, Boston. The Shadow of a Crime. A Cumbrian Romance. By HALL CAINE, author of "The Manxman," "The Deemster," etc., with twelve full-page illustrations in half-tone, from drawings by M. B. Prendergast. i vol., cloth, illustrated, gilt top . . . $1.25 The Works of Gabriel d' Annunzio. The Triumph of Death. The Intruder. The flaidens of the Rocks. The Child of Pleasure. Each, i vol., lib. I2mo, cloth $i-5<> "The writer of the greatest promise to-day in Italy, and perhaps one of the most unique figures in contemporary literature, is Gabriel d'Annunzio, the poet-novelist. The Bookman. " This book is realistic. Some say that it is brutally so. But the realism is that of Flaubert and not of Zola. There is no plain speaking for the sake of plain speaking. Every detail is justified in the fact that it illuminates either the motives or the actions of the man and woman who here stand revealed. It is deadly true. The author holds the mirror up to nature, and the reader, as he sees his own experiences duplicated in passage after passage, has something of the same sensation as all of us first reading of GeoVge Meredith's 'Egoist.' Reading these pages is like being out in the counVon a darknight in a storm ^ Suddenly a flash of lightning comes and every detail of your surroundings is revealed." Review of the Triumph of Death, in the New York Evening Sun. TkARCflBMP'S UNGUARDED MOMENT OSGAR fAY ADAMS