The Militants | Page 6

big laugh.
"Listen, Eleanor. This afternoon I'll come for you to walk, and we'll talk that all over. Go home now, my lamb." And Eleanor, like a pale-pink over-sized butterfly, went.
"Do you know that child, Jim?" Mr. Fielding asked, grimly.
"Yes," answered the Bishop, with a serene pull at his cigar.
"Do you know she's the child of that good-for-nothing Fairfax Preston, who married Eleanor Gray against her people's will and took her South to--to--starve, practically?"
The Bishop drew a long breath, and then he turned and looked at his old friend with a clear, wide gaze. "She's Eleanor Gray's child, too, Dick," he said.
Mr. Fielding was silent a moment. "Has the boy talked to you?" he asked. The Bishop nodded. "It's the worst trouble I've ever had. It would kill me to see him marry that man's daughter. I can't and won't resign myself to it. Why should I? Why should Dick choose, out of all the world, the one girl in it who would be insufferable to me. I can't give in about this. Much as Dick is to me I'll let him go sooner. I hope you'll see I'm right, Jim, but right or wrong, I've made up my mind."
The Bishop stretched a large, bony hand across the little table that stood between them. Fielding's fell on it. Both men smoked silently for a minute.
"Have you anything against the girl, Dick?" asked the Bishop, presently.
"That she's her father's daughter--it's enough. The bad blood of generations is in her. I don't like the South--I don't like Southerners. And I detest beyond words Fairfax Preston. But the girl is certainly beautiful, and they say she is a good girl, too," he acknowledged, gloomily.
"Then I think you're wrong," said the Bishop.
"You don't understand, Jim," Fielding took it up passionately. "That man has been the bête noir of my life. He has gotten in my way half-a-dozen times deliberately, in business affairs, little as he amounts to himself. Only two years ago--but that isn't the point after all." He stopped gloomily. "You'll wonder at me, but it's an older feud than that. I've never told anyone, but I want you to understand, Jim, how impossible this affair is." He bit off the end of a fresh cigar, lighted it and then threw it across the geraniums into the grass. "I wanted to marry her mother," he said, brusquely. "That man got her. Of course, I could have forgiven that, but it was the way he did it. He lied to her--he threw it in my teeth that I had failed. Can't you see how I shall never forgive him--never, while I live!" The intensity of a life-long, silent hatred trembled in his voice.
"It's the very thing it's your business to do, Dick," said the Bishop, quietly. "'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you'--what do you think that means? It's your very case. It may be the hardest thing in the world, but it's the simplest, most obvious." He drew a long puff at his cigar, and looked over the flowers to the ocean.
"Simple! Obvious!" Fielding's voice was full of bitterness. "That's the way with you churchmen! You live outside passions and temptations, and then preach against them, with no faintest notion of their force. It sounds easy, doesn't it? Simple and obvious, as you say. You never loved Eleanor Gray, Jim; you never had to give her up to a man you knew beneath her; you never had to shut murder out of your heart when you heard that he'd given her a hard life and a glad death. Eleanor Gray! Do you remember how lovely she was, how high-spirited and full of the joy of life?" The Bishop's great figure was still as if the breath in it had stopped, but Fielding, carried on the flood of his own rushing feeling, did not notice. "Do you remember, Jim?" he repeated.
"I remember," the Bishop said, and his voice sounded very quiet.
"Jove! How calm you are!" exploded the other.
"You're a churchman; you live behind a wall, you hear voices through it, but you can't be in the fight--it's easy for you."
"Life isn't easy for anyone, Dick," said the Bishop, slowly. "You know that. I'm fighting the current as well as you. You are a churchman as well as I. If it's my métier to preach against human passion, it's yours to resist it. You're letting this man you hate mould your character; you're letting him burn the kindness out of your soul. He's making you bitter and hard and unjust--and you're letting him. I thought you had more will--more poise. It isn't your affair what he is, even what he does, Dick--it's your affair to keep your own judgment unwarped, your own heart gentle, your own soul untainted by the poison of hatred. We are