The Case of Richard Meynell by Mrs. Humphry Ward

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So much for the news he gave. As to the news he hungered for, Meynell had
but crumbs to give him. To neither Stephen nor any one else could Alice
Puttenham's letters be disclosed. Meynell's lips were sealed upon her
story now as they had ever been; and, however shrewdly he might guess at
Stephen's guesses, he said nothing, and Stephen asked nothing on the
subject.

As to Hester, he was told that she was well, though often moody and
excitable, that she seemed already to have tired of the lessons and
occupations she had taken up with such prodigious energy at the beginning
of her stay, and that she had made violent friends with a young teacher
from the Ecole Normale, a refined, intelligent woman, in every way fit to
be her companion, with whom on holidays she sometimes made long
excursions out of Paris.

But to Meynell, poor Alice Puttenham poured out all the bitterness of her
heart:

"It seems to me that the little hold I had over her, and the small
affection she had for me when we arrived here, are both now less than
they were. During the last week especially (the letter was dated the
fourteenth of January) I have been at my wits' end how to amuse or please
her. She resents being watched and managed more than ever. One feels
there is a tumult in her soul to which we have no access. Her teachers
complain of her temper and her caprice. And yet she dazzles and
fascinates as much as ever. I suspect she doesn't sleep--she has a worn
look quite unnatural at her age--but it makes her furious to be asked.
Sometimes, indeed, she seems to melt toward me; the sombre look passes
away, and she is melancholy and soft, with tears in her eyes now and
then, which I dare not notice.

"Oh, my dear friend, I am grateful for all you tell me of the changed
situation at Markborough. But after all the thing is done--there can be
no undoing it. The lies mingled with the truth have been put down.
Perhaps people are ready now to let the truth itself slip back with
the lies into the darkness. But how can we--Edith and I--and Hester--ever
live the old life again? The old shelter, the old peace, are gone. We are
wanderers and pilgrims henceforward!

"As far as I know, Hester is still in complete ignorance of all that has
happened. I have told her that Edith finds Tours so economical that she
prefers to stay abroad for a couple of years, and to let the Upcote
house. And I have said also that when she herself is tired of Paris, I
am ready to take her to Germany, and then to Italy. She laughed, as
though I had said something ridiculous! One never knows her real mind.
But at least I see no sign of any suspicion in her; and I am sure that
she has seen no English newspaper that could have given her a clue. As to
Philip Meryon, as I have told you before, I often feel a vague
uneasiness; but watch as I will, I can find nothing to justify it. Oh!
Richard, my heart is broken for her. A little love from her, and the
whole world would change for me. But even what I once possessed these
last few months seem to have taken from me!"

"The thing is done!--there can be no undoing it." That was the sore
burden of all Meynell's thoughts, awakening in him, at times, the "bitter
craving to strike heavy blows" at he knew not what. What, indeed, could
ever undo the indecency, the cruelty, the ugly revelations of these
three months? The grossness of the common public, the weakness of
friends, the solemn follies to which men are driven by hate or bigotry:
these things might well have roused the angry laughter that lives in all
quick and honest souls. But the satiric mood, when it appeared, soon
vanished. He remembered the saying of Meredith concerning the spectacle
of Bossuet over the dead body of Moliere--"at which the dark angels may,
but men do not, laugh."

This bitterness might have festered within him, but for the blessedness
of Mary Elsmere's letters. She had seen the apology; she knew nothing of
its causes. But she betrayed a joy that was almost too proud to know
itself as joy; since what doubt could there ever have been but that right
and nobleness would prevail? Catharine wrote the warmest and kindest of
letters. But Mary's every word was balm, just because she knew nothing,
and wrote out of the fulness of her mere faith in him, ready to let her
trust take any shape he would. And though she knew nothing, she seemed by
some divine instinct to understand also the pain that overshadowed the
triumph; to be ready to sit silent with him before the irreparable. Day
by day, as he read these letters, his heart burned within him; and Rose
noted the growing restlessness. But he had heavy arrears of parish
business upon him, of correspondence, of literary work. He struggled on,
the powers of mind and body flagging, till one night, when he had been
nearly a week at Maudeley, Rose came to him one evening, and said with a
smile that had in it just a touch of sweet mockery--

"My dear friend, you are doing no good here at all! Go and see Mary!"

He turned upon her, amazed.

"She has not sent for me."

Rose laughed out.

"Did you expect her to be as modern as that?"

He murmured--

"I have been waiting for a word."

"What right had you to wait? Go and get it out of her! Where will you
stay?"

He gasped.

"There is the farm at the head of the valley."

"Telegraph to-night."

He thought a little--the colour flooding into his face. And then he
quietly went to Rose's writing-table, and wrote his telegram.

CHAPTER XXI

But before he took the midday train from Markborough to the North, on the
following day, Meynell spent half an hour with his Bishop in the
episcopal library.

It was a strange meeting. When Bishop Craye first caught sight of the
entering figure, he hurried forward, and as the door closed upon the
footman, he seized Meynell's hand in both his own.

"I see what you have gone through," he said, with emotion; "and you would
not let me help you!"

Meynell smiled faintly.

"I knew you wished to help me--but--"

Then his voice dropped, and the Bishop would not have pressed him for the
world. They fell upon the anonymous letters, a comparatively safe topic,
and the relation of Barron to them. Naturally Meynell gave the Bishop no
hint whatever of the graver matter which had finally compelled Barron's
surrender. He described his comparison of the Dawes letters with "a
document in the young man's handwriting which I happened to have in my
possession," and the gradual but certain conviction it had brought about.

"I was extraordinarily blind, however, not to find the clue earlier."

"It is not only you, my dear Meynell, that need regret it!" cried the
Bishop. "I hope you have sometimes given a thought to the men on our side
compelled to see the fight waged--"

"With such a weapon? I knew very well that no one under your influence,
my lord, would touch it," said Meynell simply.

The Bishop observed him, and with an inner sympathy, one might almost say
a profound and affectionate admiration, which contrasted curiously with
the public position in which they stood to each other. It was now very
generally recognized, and especially in Markborough and its diocese, that
Meynell had borne himself with extraordinary dignity and patience under
the ordeal through which he had passed. And the Bishop--whose guess had
so nearly hit the truth, who had been persuaded that in the whole matter
Meynell was but the victim of some trust, some duty, which honour and
conscience would not let him betray in order to save himself--the Bishop
was but the more poignantly of this opinion now that he had the man
before him. The weeks of suffering, the long storm of detraction, had
left their mark; and it was not a light one. The high-hearted little
Bishop felt himself in some way guilty, obscurely and representatively,
if not directly.

Yet, at the same time, when the personal matter dropped away, and they
passed, as they soon did, to a perfectly calm discussion of the action in
the Court of Arches which was to begin within a week, nothing could be
clearer or more irrevocable than the differences, ecclesiastical and
intellectual, which divided these two men, who in matters of personal
feeling were so sensitively responsive the one to the other.

Meynell dwelt on the points of law raised in the pleadings, on the
bearing of previous cases--the _Essays and Reviews_ case above all--upon
the suit. The antecedents of the counsel employed on both sides, the
idiosyncrasies of the judge, the probable length of the trial; their talk
ranged round these matters, without ever striking deeper. It was assumed
between them that the expulsion of the Modernist clergy was only a
question of months--possibly weeks. Once indeed Meynell referred slightly
to the agitation in the country, to the growing snowball of the petition
to Parliament, to the now certain introduction of a Bill "To promote an
amended constitution for the Church of England." The Bishop's eyebrows
went up, his lip twitched. It was the scorn of a spiritual aristocracy
threatened by the populace.

But in general they talked with extraordinary frankness and mutual good
feeling; and they grasped hands more than cordially at the end. They
might have been two generals, meeting before a battle, under the white
flag.

* * * * *

Still the same mild January weather; with unseasonable shoots putting
forth, and forebodings on the part of all garden-lovers, as fresh and
resentful as though such forebodings, with their fulfilments, were not
the natural portion of all English gardeners.

In the Westmoreland dales, the month was rainier than elsewhere, but if
possible, milder. Yellow buds were already foolishly breaking on the
gorse, and weak primroses, as though afraid to venture, and yet
venturing, were to be found in the depths of many woods.

Meynell had slept at Whindale. In the morning a trap conveyed him and his
bag to the farmhouse at the head of the valley; and the winter sun had
only just scattered the mists from the dale when, stick in hand, he found
himself on the road to Mrs. Elsmere's little house, Burwood.

With every step his jaded spirits rose. He was a passionate lover of
mountains, with that modern spirit which finds in them man's best refuge
from modernness. The damp fragrance of the mossy banks and bare hedges;
the racing freshness of the stream, and the little eddies of foam blown
from it by the wind; the small gray sheep in the fields; the crags
overhead dyed deep in withered heather; the stone farmhouses with their
touch of cheerful white on door and window; all the exquisite detail of
grass, and twig and stone; and overhead the slowly passing clouds in the
wide sweep of the dale--these things to him were spiritual revival, they
dressed and prepared him for that great hour to which dimly, yet through
all his pulses, he felt he was going.

The little house sent up a straight column of blue smoke into the quiet
air. Its upper windows were open; the sun was on its lichened porch, and
on the silver stem of the birch tree which rose from the mossy grass
beside it.

He did not need to knock. Mary was in the open doorway, her face all
light and rose colour; and in the shadows of the passage behind her stood
Catharine. When with the touch of Mary's hand still warm in his, Meynell
turned to greet her mother, he was seized, even through the quiet emotion
which held them all, by an impression of change. Some energy of physical
life had faded from the worn nobility of Catharine's face, instead a
"grave heavenliness" which disquieted the spectator, beautiful as it was.

But the momentary shock was lost in the quiet warmth of her greeting.

"You are going to take her for a walk?" she asked wistfully, as Mary left
them alone in the little sitting-room.

"You allow it?" said Meynell, hardly knowing what he said, and still
retaining her hand.

Catharine smiled.

"Mary is her own mistress." Then she added, with a deep, involuntary
sigh: "Whatever she says to you, she knows she has her mother's
blessing."

Meynell stooped and kissed her hand.

A few minutes later, he and Mary had taken the road along the dale.

Catharine stood under the little porch to look after them. Mingled
sweetness and bitterness filled her mind. She pictured to herself for an
instant what it would have been if she had been giving Mary to a
Christian pastor of the stamp of her own father, "sound in the faith," a
"believer," entering upon what had always seemed to her from her
childhood the ideal and exalted life of the Christian ministry. As things
were, in a few weeks, Richard Meynell would be an exile and a wanderer,
chief among a regiment of banished men, driven out by force from the
National Church; without any of the dignity--that dignity which had been
her husband's--of voluntary renunciation. And Mary would become his wife
only to share in his rebellion, his defiance, and his exile.

She crossed her hands tightly upon her breast as though she were
imprinting these sad facts upon her consciousness, learning to face them,
to bear them with patience. And yet--in some surprising way--they did not
hurt her as sharply as they would once have done. Trembling--almost in
terror--she asked herself whether her own faith was weakening. And amid
the intensity of aspiration and love with which her mind threw itself on
the doubt, she turned back, tottering a little, to her chair by the fire.
She was glad to be alone, passionately as she loved her Mary. And as she
sat now following Meynell and Mary in thought along the valley, and now
listening vaguely to the murmur of the fire or the stream outside, there
came upon her a first gentle premonition--as though a whisper, from far
away--of the solitude of death.

Lines from the _Christian Year_, the book on which her girlhood had been
nourished, stole into her mind:

Why should we faint and fear to live alone,
Since all alone, so Heaven has willed, we die?

Never had sunshine seemed to Meynell so life-giving as this pale wintry
warmth. The soft sound of Mary's dress beside him; the eyes she turned
upon him when she spoke, so frank and sweet, yet for her lover, so full
of mystery; the lines of her young form, compact of health and grace; the
sound of her voice, the turn of her head--everything about her filled him
with a tumult of feeling not altogether blissful, though joy was
uppermost. For now that the great moment was come, now that he trembled
on the verge of a happiness he had every reason to think was his, he was
a prey to many strange qualms and tremors. In the first place he was
suddenly and sorely conscious of his age! Forty-four to her twenty-six!
Was it fitting?--was it right? And more than that! Beside her freshness,
her springing youth, he realized his own jaded spirit, almost with a
sense of guilt. These six months of strenuous battle and leadership,
these new responsibilities, and the fierce call which had been made on
every gift and power, ending in the dumb, proud struggle, the growing
humiliation of the preceding weeks, had left him ripened indeed,
magnified indeed, as a personality; but it was as though down the
shadowed vista of life he saw his youth, as "Another self," a
Doppelgaenger, disappearing forever.

While she!--before _her_ were all the years of glamour, of happy
instinctive action, when a man or woman is worth just what they dream,
when dream and act flow together. Could he give her anything worth her
having in exchange for this sheer youth of hers? He saw before him a long
and dusty struggle; the dust of it choking, often, the purest sources of
feeling. Cares about money; cares about health; the certain enmity of
many good men; the bitterness that waits on all controversial success or
failure: all these there must be--he could not shield her from them.

She, on her part, saw plainly that he was depressed, knew well that he
had suffered. As the Bishop had perceived, it was written on his aspect.
But her timidity as yet prevented her from taking the initiative with
him, as later she would learn to do. She felt for him at this stage
partly the woman's love, partly the deep and passionate loyalty of the
disciple. And it was possibly this very loyalty in her from which Meynell
shrank. He felt toward himself and his role, in the struggle to which he
was committed, a half despairing, half impatient irony, which saved him
from anything like a prophetic pose. Some other fellow would do it so
much better! But meanwhile it had to be done.

So that, charged as was the atmosphere between them, it was some time
before they found a real freedom of speech. The openings, the gambits,
which were to lead them to the very heart of the game, were at first
masked and hesitating. They talked a little--perfunctorily--about the
dale and its folk, and Mary fell without difficulty now and then into the
broad Westmoreland speech, which delighted Meynell's ear, and brought the
laugh back to his eyes. Then, abruptly, he told her that the campaign of
slander was over, and that the battle, instead of "infinite mess and
dislocation," was now to be a straight and clean one. He said nothing of
Barron; but he spoke tenderly of the Bishop, and Mary's eyes swam a
little.

She on her part dared to speak of Alice and Hester. And very soon it was
quietly recognized between these two that Alice's story was known to
Mary; and, for the first time in his life, Meynell spoke with free
emotion and self-criticism of the task which Neville Flood had laid
upon him. Had there been in Mary some natural dread of the moment when
she must first hear the full story of his relation to Alice? If so, it
was soon dispelled. He could not have told the story more simply; but its
beauty shone out. Only, she was startled, even terrified, by certain
glimpses which his talk gave her into his feeling with regard to Hester.
She saw plainly that the possibility of a catastrophe, in spite of all he
could do, was ever present to him; and she saw also, or thought she saw,
that his conception of his own part in the great religious campaign was
strangely--morbidly--dependent upon the fate of Hester. If he was able to
save her from herself and from the man who threatened her, well and good;
if not, as he had said to Mary once before, he was not fit to be any
man's leader, and should feel himself the Jonah of any cause. There was a
certain mystical passion in it, the strong superstition of a man in whom
a great natural sensitiveness led often and readily to despondency; as
though he "asked for a sign."

They passed the noisy little river by the stepping-stones and then
climbed a shoulder of fell between Long Whindale and the next valley.
Descending a sunny mountainside, they crossed some water meadows, and
mounted the hill beyond, to a spot that Mary had marked in her walks.
Beside a little tumbling stream and beneath a thicket of holly, lay a
flat-topped rock commanding all the spectacle of flood and fell. Mary
guided him there; and then stood silent and flushed, conscious that she
herself had brought the supreme moment to its birth. The same perception
rushed upon Meynell. He looked into her eyes, smiling and masterful, all
his hesitations cleared away....

"Sit there, my lady of the fells!"

He led her to the rocky throne, and, wrapped in his old Inverness cloak,
he took a place on a lesser stone at her feet. Suddenly, he raised a hand
and caught hers. She found herself trembling, and looking down into his
upturned face.

"Mary!--Mary _darling_!--is it mine?"

The question was just whispered, and she whispered her reply. They were
alone in a lovely wilderness of fell and stream. Only a shepherd walked
with his flock in a field half a mile away, and across the valley a
ploughman drove his horses.

At the murmur in his ear, Meynell, this time, put up both hands, and drew
her down to him. The touch of her fresh lips was rapture. And yet--

"My rose!" he said, almost with a groan. "What can you make of such an
old fellow? I love you--_love_ you--but I am not worthy of you!"

"I am the judge of that," she said softly. And looking up he saw the
colour in her cheeks fluttering, and two bright tears in her eyes.
Timidly she took one hand away from him and began to stroke back the hair
from his brow.

"You look so tired!"--she murmured--"as though you had been in trouble.
And I wasn't there!"

"You were always there!"

And springing from his lowly seat, he came to the rock beside her, and
drew her within the shelter of his cloak, looking down upon her with
infinite tenderness.

"You don't know what you're undertaking," he said, his eyes moist, his
lips smiling. "I am an old bachelor, and my ways are detestable! Can you
ever put up with the pipes and the dogs? I am the untidiest man alive!"

"Will Anne ever let me touch your papers?"

"Goodness! what will Anne say to us! I forgot Anne," he said, laughing.
Then, bending over her, "We shall be poor, darling!--and very
uncomfortable. Can you really stand it--and me?"

"Shall we have a roof over our heads at all?" asked Mary, but so dizzily
happy that she knew but vaguely what she said.

"I have already bespoken a cottage. They are going to make me Editor of
the _Modernist_. We shall have bread and butter, dearest, but not much
more."

"I have a little," said Mary, shyly.

Meynell looked rather scared.

"Not much, I hope!"

"Enough for gowns!--and--and a little more."

"I prefer to buy my wife's gowns--I will!" said Meynell with energy.
"Promise me, darling, to put all your money into a drawer--or a
money-box. Then when we want something really amusing--a cathedral--or
a yacht--we'll take it out."

So they laughed together, he all the while holding her close crushed
against him, and she deafened almost by the warm beating of a man's heart
beneath her cheek.

And presently silence came, a silence in which one of the rare ecstasies
of life came upon them and snatched them to the third heaven. From the
fold of the hill in which they sat, sheltered both by the fell itself,
and by the encircling hollies, they overlooked a branching dale, half
veiled, and half revealed by sunny cloud. Above the western fells they
had just crossed, hung towers and domes of white cumulus, beneath which a
pearly sunshine slipped through upon the broad fell-side, making of it
one wide sunlit pleasance, dyed in the red and orange of the withered
fern, and dotted with black holly and juniper. Round the head of the dale
the curtain of cloud hung thicker, save where one superb crag tore it
asunder, falling sheer into the green gentleness of the fields. In the
silence, all the voices of nature spoke; the rising wind, which flung
itself against the hill-slopes at their feet; the insistent flow of the
river, descending from the reservoirs far away; and the sharp chatter of
the little beck leaping at their side from stone to stone. Passionately,
in Meynell's heart the "buried life" awoke, which only love can free from
the cavern where it lies, and bring into the full energy of day.

"One goes on talking--preaching--babbling--about love," he said to her;
"what else is there to preach about? If love is not the key to life, then
there is no key, and no man need preach any more. Only, my Amor has been
till now a stern God! He has in his hands!--I know it!--all the noblest
rewards and ecstasies of life; but so far, I have seen him wring them out
of horror, or pain. The most heavenly things I have ever seen have been
the things of suffering. I think of a poor fellow dying in the pit and
trying to give me his last message to his wife; of a mother fading out of
life, still clasping her babes, with hands twisted almost out of human
shape by hard work; or a little lad--" his voice dropped--"only last
week!--who saved his worthless brother's life by giving him warning of
some escaping trucks, and was crushed himself. 'I couldn't help it,
sir!'--_apologizing_ to me and the foreman, as we knelt by him!--'I knew
Jim had the drink in him.' In all these visions, Love was divine--but
awful! And here!--_here_!--I see his wings outspread upon that
mountain-side; he comes clothed, not in agony, but in this golden
peace--this beauty--this wild air; he lays your head upon my breast!"

Or again:

"There is a new philosophy which has possessed me for months; the thought
of a great man, which seizes upon us dull lesser creatures, and seems to
give us, for a time at least, new eyes and ears, as though, like
Melampus, we had caught the hidden language of the world! It rests
on the notion of the endless creativeness and freedom of life. It is the
negation of all fate, all predestination. _Nothing_ foreknown, nothing
predestined! No _necessity_--no _anangke_--darling!--either in the world
process, or the mind of God, that you and I should sit here to-day, heart
to heart! It was left for our wills to do, our hearts to conceive, God
lending us the world, so to speak, to work on! All our past cutting
into--carving out--this present; all our past alive in the present; as
all this present shall be alive in the future. There is no 'iron law' for
life and will, beloved--they create, they are the masters, they are
forever new. All the same!"--his tone changed--"I believe firmly that
this rock knew from all eternity that you and I should sit here to-day!"

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