The Case of Richard Meynell by Mrs. Humphry Ward

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Mother and daughter started about eight o'clock for the cottage. They had
a lantern with them, but they hardly needed it, for through the
tranquillized air a new moon shone palely, and the frost made way.
Catharine walked rejoicing apparently in renewed strength and recovered
powers of exertion. Some mining, crippling influence seemed to have been
removed from her since her dream. And yet, even at this time, she was not
without premonitions--physical premonitions--as to the future--faint
signal-voices that the obscure life of the body can often communicate to
the spirit.

They found the cottage all in light and movement. Servants were flying
about; boxes were in the hall; Hester had come over to spend the night at
the cottage that she and "Aunt Alice" might start by an early train.

Alice came out to meet her visitors in the little hall. Catharine slipped
into the drawing-room. Alice and Mary held each other enwrapped in one of
those moments of life that have no outward expression but dimmed eyes
and fluttering breath.

"Is it all done? Can't I help?" said Mary at last, scarcely knowing what
she said, as Alice released her.

"No, dear, it's all done--except our books. Come up with me while I pack
them."

And they vanished upstairs, hand in hand.

Meanwhile Hester in her most reckless mood was alternately flouting and
caressing Catharine Elsmere. She was not in the least afraid of
Catharine, and it was that perhaps which had originally drawn Catharine's
heart to her. Elsmere's widow was accustomed to feel herself avoided by
young people who discussed a wild literature, and appeared to be without
awe toward God, or reverence toward man. Yet all the time, through her
often bewildered reprobation of them, she hungered for their affection,
and knew that she carried in herself treasures of love to give--though no
doubt, on terms.

But Hester had always divined these treasures, and was, besides, as a
rule, far too arrogant and self-centred to restrain herself in anything
she wished to say or do for fear of hurting or shocking her elders.

At this moment she had declared herself tired out with packing, and
was lounging in an armchair in the little drawing-room. A Japanese
dressing-gown of some pale pink stuff sprayed with almond blossom floated
about her, disclosing a skimpy silk petticoat and a slender foot from
which she had kicked its shoe. Her pearly arms and neck were almost bare;
her hair tumbled on her shoulders; her eyes shone with excitement
provoked by a dozen hidden and conflicting thoughts. In her beauty, her
ardent and provocative youth, she seemed to be bursting out of the little
room, with its artistic restraint of colour and furnishing.

"Don't please do any more fussing," she said imploringly to Catharine.
"It's all done--only Aunt Alice thinks it's never done. Do sit down and
talk."

And she put out an impatient hand, and drew the stately Catharine toward
a chair beside her.

"You ought to be in bed," said Catharine, retaining her hand. The girl's
ignorance of all that others knew affected her strangely--produced a
great softness and compunction.

"I shouldn't sleep. I wonder when I shall get a decent amount of sleep
again!" said Hester, pressing back the hair from her cheeks. Then she
turned sharply on her visitor:

"Of course you know, Mrs. Elsmere, that I am simply being sent away--in
disgrace."

"I know"--Catharine smiled, though her tone was grave--"that those who
love you think there ought to be a change."

"That's a nice way of putting it--a real gentlemanly way," said Hester,
swaying backward and forward, her hands round her knees. "But all the
same it's true. They're sending me away because they don't know what
I'll do next. They think I'll do something abominable."

The girl's eyes sparkled.

"Why will you give your guardians this anxiety?" asked Catharine, not
without severity. "They are never at rest about you. My dear--they only
wish your good."

Hester laughed. She threw out a careless hand and laid it on Catharine's
knee.

"Isn't it odd, Mrs. Elsmere, that you don't know anything about me,
though--you won't mind, will you?--though you're so kind to me, and I do
like you so. But you can't know anything, can you, about girls--like
me?"

And looking up from where she lay deep in the armchair, she turned
half-mocking eyes on her companion.

"I don't know--perhaps--about girls like you," said Catharine, smiling,
and shyly touching the hand on her knee. "But I live half my life--with
girls."

"Oh--poor girls? Girls in factories--girls that wear fringes, and sham
pearl beads, and six ostrich feathers in their hats on Sundays? No, I
don't think I'm like them. If I were they, I shouldn't care about
feathers or the sham pearls. I should be more likely to try and steal
some real ones! No, but I mean really girls like me--rich girls, though
of course I'm not rich--but you understand? Do you know any girls who
gamble and paint--their faces I mean--and let men lend them money, and
pay for their dresses?"

Hester sat up defiantly, looking at her companion.

"No, I don't know any of that kind," said Catharine quietly. "I'm
old-fashioned, you see--they wouldn't want to know me."

Hester's mouth twitched.

"Well, I'm not that kind exactly! I don't paint because--well, I suppose
I needn't! And I don't play for money, because I've nobody to play with.
As for letting men lend you money--"

"That you would never disgrace yourself by doing!" said Catharine
sharply.

Hester's look was enigmatic.

"Well, I never did it. But I knew a girl in London--very pretty--and as
mad as you like. She was an orphan and her relatives didn't care twopence
about her. She got into debt, and a horrid old man offered to lend her a
couple of hundred pounds if she'd give him a kiss. She said no, and then
she told an older woman who was supposed to look after her. And what do
you suppose she said?"

Catharine was silent.

"'Well, you _are_ a little fool!' That was all she got for her pains. Men
are villains--_I_ think! But they're exciting!" And Hester clasped her
hands behind her head, and looked at the ceiling, smiling to herself,
while the dressing-gown sleeves fell back from her rounded arms.

Catharine frowned. She suddenly rose, and kneeling down by Hester's
chair, she took the girl in her arms.

"Hester, dear!--if you want a friend--whenever you want a friend--come to
me! If you are ever in trouble send for me. I would always come--always!"

She felt the flutter of the girl's heart as she enfolded her. Then Hester
lightly freed herself, though her voice shook--

"You're the kindest person, Mrs. Elsmere--you're awfully, awfully, kind.
But I'm going to have a jolly good time in Paris. I shall read all kinds
of things--I shall go to the theatre--I shall enjoy myself famously."

"And you'll have Aunt Alice all to yourself."

Hester was silent. The lovely corners of her mouth stiffened.

"You must be very good to her, Hester," said Catharine, with entreaty in
her voice. "She's not well--and very tired."

"Why doesn't she _trust_ me?" said Hester, almost between her teeth.

"What do you mean?"

After a hesitating pause, the girl broke out with the story of the
miniature.

"How can I love her when she won't trust me?" she cried again, with
stormy breath.

Catharine's heart melted within her.

"But you _must_ love her, Hester! Why, she has watched over you all your
life. Can't you see--that she's had trouble--and she's not strong!"

And she looked down with emotion on the girl thus blindly marching to a
veiled future, unable, by no fault of her own, to distinguish her lovers
from her foes. Had a lie, ever yet, in human history, justified itself?
So this pure moralist!--to whom morals had come, silently, easily,
irresistibly, as the sun slips into the sky.

"Oh, I'll look after her," said Hester shortly; "why, of course I will.
I'm very glad she's going to Paris--it'll be good for her. And as for
you"--she bent forward like a queen, and lightly kissed Catharine on the
cheek--"I daresay I'll remember what you've said--you're a great, great
dear! It was luck for Mary to have got you for a mother. But I'm all
right--I'm all right!"

* * * * *

When the Elsmeres were gone, Hester still sat on alone in the
drawing-room. The lamp had burnt dim, and the little room was cold.

Presently she slipped her hand into the white bodice she wore. A letter
lay there, and her fingers caressed it. "I don't know whether I love him
or not--perhaps I do, and perhaps I don't. I don't know whether I believe
Uncle Richard--or this letter. But--I'm going to find out! I'm not going
to be stopped from finding out."

And as she lay there, she was conscious of bonds she was half determined
to escape, half willing to bear; of a fluttering excitement and dread.
Step by step, and with a childish bravado, she had come within the
influences of sex; and her fate was upon her.

CHAPTER XVIII

Meanwhile, amid this sensitive intermingling of the thoughts and feelings
of women, there arose the sudden tumult and scandal of the new elements
which had thrust themselves into what was already known to the religious
world throughout England as "the Meynell case." During November and
December that case came to include two wholly different things: the
ecclesiastical suit in the Court of Arches, which, owing to a series of
delays and to the illness of the Dean of the Court, was not to be heard
in all probability before February, and the personal charges brought
against the incumbent of Upcote Minor.

These fresh charges were formally launched by Henry Barron, the chief
promoter also, as we know, of the ecclesiastical suit, in a letter
written by him to Bishop Craye, on the very night when Alice Puttenham
revealed her secret to Catharine Elsmere. But before we trace the effect
of the letter, let us look for a moment at the general position of the
Movement when this second phase of Meynell's connection with it began.

At that time the pending suits against the Modernist leaders--for there
were now five instituted by different bishops, as test cases, in
different parts of England--were already the subject of the keenest
expectation and debate not only in church circles, but amid sections of
the nation which generally trouble themselves very little about clerical
or religious disputes. New births of time were felt to be involved in the
legal struggle; passionate hopes and equally passionate fears hung upon
it. There were old men in quiet country parsonages who, when they read
the _Modernist_ and followed the accounts of the Movement, were inclined
to say to themselves with secret joy and humility that other men were
entering into their labours, and the fields were at last whitening to
harvest; while others, like Newman of old, had "fierce thoughts toward
the Liberals," talked and spoke of Meynell and the whole band of
Modernist clergy as traitors with whom no parley could be kept, and were
ready to break up the Church at twenty-four hours' notice rather than sit
down at the same table of the Lord with heretics and Socinians.

Between these two groups of men, each equally confident and clear, though
by no means equally talkative, there was a middle region that contained
many anxious minds and some of the wisest heads in England. If, at the
time of Norham's visit to Maudeley, Bishop Craye of Markborough, and many
other bishops with him, were still certain that the Movement would be
promptly and easily put down, so far at least as its organic effect on
the Church of England was concerned, yet, as November and December wore
on, anxieties deepened, and confidence began to waver. The passion of the
Movement was beginning to run through England, as it seemed to many, like
the flame of an explosion through a dusty mine. What amazed and terrified
the bishops was the revelation of pent-up energies, rebellions, ideals,
not only among their own flocks, but in quarters, and among men and
women, hitherto ruled out of religious affairs by general consent. They
pondered the crowds which had begun to throng the Modernist churches, the
extraordinary growth of the Modernist press, and the figures reported day
by day as to the petition to be presented to Parliament in February.
There was no orthodox person in authority who was not still determined on
an unconditional victory; but it was admitted that the skies were
darkening.

The effect of the Movement on the Dissenters--on that half of religious
England which stands outside the National Church, where "grace" takes the
place of authority, and bishops are held to be superfluities incompatible
with the pure milk of the Word--was in many respects remarkable. The
majority of the Wesleyan Methodists had thrown themselves strongly on
to the side of the orthodox party in the Church; but among the
Congregationalists and Presbyterians there was visible a great ferment of
opinion and a great cleavage of sympathy; while, among the Primitive
Methodists, a body founded on the straitest tenets of Bible worship, yet
interwoven, none the less, with the working class life of England and
Wales, and bringing day by day the majesty and power of religion to bear
upon the acts and consciences of plain, poor, struggling men, there was
visible a strong and definite current of acquiescence in Modernist ideas,
which was inexplicable, till one came to know that among Meynell's
friends at Upcote there were two or three Primitive local preachers who
had caught fire from him, were now active members of his Church Council,
and ardent though persecuted missionaries to their own body.

Meanwhile the Unitarians--small and gallant band!--were like persons
standing on tiptoe before an opening glory. In their isolated and often
mistaken struggle they had felt themselves for generations stricken with
chill and barrenness; their blood now began to feel the glow of new
kinships, the passion of large horizons. So, along the banks of some
slender and much hindered stream, there come blown from the nearing sea
prophetic scents and murmurs, and one may dream that the pent water knows
at last the whence and whither of its life.

But the strangest spectacle of all perhaps was presented by the orthodox
camp. For, in proportion as the Modernist attack developed, was the
revival of faith among those hostile to it, or unready for it. For the
first time in their lives, religion became interesting--thrilling
even--to thousands of persons for whom it had long lost all real savour.
Fierce question and answer, the hot cut and thrust of argument, the
passion of honest fight on equal terms--without these things, surely,
there has been no religious epoch, of any importance, in man's history.
English orthodoxy was at last vitally attacked; and it began to show a
new life, and express itself in a new language. These were times when men
on all sides felt that stretching and straining of faculty which ushers
in the days of spiritual or poetic creation; times when the most
confident Modernist of them all knew well that he, no more than any one
else, could make any guess worth having as to the ultimate future.

Of all this rapid and amazing development the personality and the
writings of Richard Meynell had in few months become the chief popular
symbol. There were some who thought that he was likely to take much
the same place in the Modernist Movement of the twentieth century as
Newman had taken in the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth; and men were
beginning to look for the weekly article in the _Modernist_ with the
same emotion of a passionate hero-worship on the one hand, and of angry
repulsion on the other, with which the Oxford of the thirties had been
wont to look for each succeeding "Tract," or for Newman's weekly sermon
at St. Mary's. To Newman's high subtleties of brain, to Newman's magic of
style, Richard Meynell could not pretend. But he had two advantages over
the great leader of the past: he was the disciple of a new learning which
was inaccessible to Newman; and he was on fire with social compassions
and enthusiasms to which Newman, the great Newman, was always
pathetically a stranger. In these two respects Meynell was the
representative of his own generation; while the influences flowing from
his personal character and life were such that thousands who had never
seen him loved and trusted him wholly. Men who had again and again
watched great causes break down for want of the incommunicable something
which humanity exacts from its leaders felt with a quiet and confident
gladness that in Meynell they had got the man they wanted, the
efficacious, indispensable man.

And now--suddenly--incredible things began to be said. It was actually
maintained that the leader round whom such feelings had gathered had
been, since his ordination, the betrayer of a young and innocent
girl, belonging to a well-known family; that although it had been in his
power for twenty years to marry the lady he had wronged, he had never
attempted to do so, but had rather, during all that time, actively
connived at the fraud by which his illegitimate child had passed as the
daughter of Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton; while over the whole period he had kept
up relations--and who knew of what character?--with the child's mother,
an inhabitant of the very village where he himself was Rector.

Presently--it was added that Mr. Henry Barron, of Upcote Minor, one of
the prosecutors in the ecclesiastical suit, had obtained unexpected and
startling confirmation of these extraordinary facts from the confession
of a woman who had been present at the birth of the child and had
identified the Rector of Upcote as the father. Then, very soon,
paragraphs of a veiled sort began to appear in some of the less
responsible newspapers. The circulation of the anonymous letters began
to be known; and the reader of a Modernist essay at an Oxford meeting
caused universal consternation by telling an indiscreet friend, who
presently spread it abroad, that Barron had already written to the Bishop
of Markborough, placing in his hands a mass of supporting evidence
relating to "this most lamentable business."

At first Meynell's friends throughout the country regarded these rumours
as a mere device of the evil one. Similar things they said, and with
truth, are constantly charged against heretics who cannot be put down.
Slander is the first weapon of religious hatred. Meynell, they
triumphantly answered, will put the anonymous letters in the hands of the
police, and proceed against Henry Barron. And they who have taken up such
a weapon shall but perish by it themselves the sooner.

But the weeks passed on. Not only were no proceedings taken, or,
apparently, in prospect, by Meynell against his accusers; not only did
the anonymous letters reappear from time to time, untracked and
unpunished, but reports of a meeting held at Upcote itself began to
spread--a meeting where Meynell had been definitely and publicly
challenged by Barron to take action for the vindication of his character,
and had definitely and publicly refused.

The world of a narrow and embittered orthodoxy began to breathe again;
and there was black depression in the Modernist camp.

Let us, however, go back a little.

Barron's letter to the Bishop was the first shot in the direct and
responsible attack. It consisted of six or seven closely written sheets,
and agreed in substance with four or five others from the same hand,
addressed at the same moment to the chief heads of the Orthodox party.

The Bishop received it at breakfast, just after he had concluded a hot
political argument with his little granddaughter Barbara.

"All Tories are wicked," said Barbara, who had a Radical father, "except
grandpapa, and he, mummy says, is weally a Riberal."

With which she had leaped into the arms of her nurse, and was carried off
gurgling, while the Bishop threatened her from afar.

Then, with a sigh of impatience, as he recognized the signature on the
envelope, he resigned himself to Barron's letter. When he had done it,
sitting by the table in his library, he threw it from him with
indignation, called for his coat, and hurried across his garden to the
Cathedral for matins. After service, as with a troubled countenance he
was emerging from the transept door, he saw Dornal in the Close and
beckoned to him.

"Come into the library for ten minutes. I very much want to speak to
you."

The Bishop led the way, and as soon as the door was shut he turned
eagerly on his companion:

"Do you know anything of these abominable stories that are being spread
about Richard Meynell?"

Dornal looked at him sadly.

"They are all over Markborough--and there is actually a copy of one of
the anonymous letters--with dashes for the names--in the _Post_ to-day?"

"I never hear these things!" said the Bishop, with an impatience which
was meant, half for a scandal-mongering world, and half for himself. "But
Barron has written me a perfectly incredible letter to-day. He seems to
be the head and front of the whole business. I don't like Barron, and I
don't like his letters!"

And throwing one slender leg over the other, while the tips of his long
fingers met in a characteristic gesture, the little Bishop stared into
the fire before him with an expression of mingled trouble and disgust.

Dornal, clearly, was no less unhappy. Drawing his chair close to the
Bishop's he described the manner in which the story had reached himself.
When he came to the curious facts concerning the diffusion and variety of
the anonymous letters, the Bishop interrupted him:

"And Barron tells me he knows nothing of these letters!"

"So I hear also."

"But, my dear Dornal, if he doesn't, it makes the thing inexplicable!
Here we have a woman who comes home dying, and sees one person
only--Henry Barron--to whom she tells her story."

The Bishop went through the points of Barron's narrative, and concluded:

"Then, on the top of this, after her death--her son denying all knowledge
of his mother's history--comes this crop of extraordinary letters,
showing, you tell me, an intimate acquaintance with the neighbourhood
and the parties concerned. And yet Barron--the only person Mrs. Sabin
saw--knows nothing of them! They are a mystery to him. But, my dear
Dornal, how _can_ they be?" The Bishop faced round with energy on his
companion. "He must at least have talked incautiously before some one!"

Dornal agreed, but could put forward no suggestion of his own. He sat
drooping by the Bishop's fire, his aspect expressing the deep distress he
did not shape in words. That very distress, however, was what made his
company so congenial to the much perturbed Bishop, who felt, moreover, a
warmer affection for Dornal than for any other member of his Chapter.

The Bishop resumed:

"Meanwhile, not a word from Meynell himself! That I confess wounds me."
He sighed. "However, I suppose he regards our old confidential relations
as broken off. To me--until the law has spoken--he is always one of my
'clergy'"--the Bishop's voice showed emotion--"and he would get my
fatherly help just as freely as ever, if he chose to ask for it. But I
don't know whether to send for him. I don't think I can send for him. The
fact is--one feels the whole thing an outrage!"

Dornal looked up.

"That's the word!" he said gratefully. Then he added--hesitating--"I
ought perhaps to tell you that I have written to Meynell--I wrote when
the first report of the thing reached me. And I am sure that he can have
no possible objection to my showing you his reply!" He put his hand into
his pocket.

"By all means, my dear Dornal!" cried the Bishop with a brightening
countenance. "We are both his friends, in spite of all that has happened
and may happen. By all means, show me the letter."

Dornal handed it over. It ran as follows:

"MY DEAR DORNAL: It was like you to write to me, and with such kindness
and delicacy. But even to you I can only say what I say to other
questioners of a very different sort. The story to which you refer is
untrue. But owing to peculiar circumstances it is impossible for me to
defend myself in the ordinary way, and my lips are sealed with regard to
it. I stand upon my character as known to my neighbours and the diocese
for nearly twenty years. If that is not enough, I cannot help it.

"Thank you always for the goodness and gentleness of your letter. I wish
with all my heart I could give you more satisfaction."

The two men looked at each other, the same conjectures passing through
both minds.

"I hear the Fox-Wiltons and Miss Puttenham have all gone abroad," said
the Bishop thoughtfully. "Poor things! I begin to see a glimmer. It seems
to me that Meynell has been the repository of some story he feels he
cannot honourably divulge. And then you tell me the letters show the
handiwork of some one intimately acquainted with the local circumstances,
who seems to have watched Meynell's daily life. It is of course possible
that he may have been imprudent with regard to this poor lady. Let us
assume that he knew her story and advised her. He may not have been
sufficiently careful. Further, there is that striking and unfortunate
likeness of which Barron of course makes the most. I noticed it myself,
on an evening when I happened, at Maudeley, to see that handsome girl and
Meynell in the same room. It is difficult to say in what it consists, but
it must occur to many people who see them together."

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