The Case of Richard Meynell by Mrs. Humphry Ward

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The two people walking through the ferny paths leading to the cottage of
Forked Pond were not, however, paying much attention to the landscape
round them. Meynell showed himself at first preoccupied and silent. A
load of anxiety depressed his vitality; and on this particular day long
hours of literary work and correspondence, beginning almost with the dawn
and broken only by the colliery scene of which he had spoken to Mrs.
Flaxman, had left deep marks upon him. Yet the girl's voice and manner,
and the fragments of talk that passed between them, seemed gradually to
create a soothing and liberating atmosphere in which it was possible to
speak with frankness, though without effort or excitement.

The Rector indeed had so far very little precise knowledge of what his
companion's feeling might be toward his own critical plight. He would
have liked to get at it; for there was something in this winning,
reserved girl that made him desire her good opinion. And yet he shrank
from any discussion with her.

He knew of course that the outlines of what had happened must be known to
her. During the ten days since their first meeting both the local and
London newspapers had given much space to the affairs of Upcote Minor. An
important public meeting in which certain decisions had been taken with
only three dissentients had led up to the startling proceedings in the
village church which Mrs. Flaxman had described to Louis Manvers. The
Bishop had written another letter, this time of a more hurried and
peremptory kind. An account of the service had appeared in the _Times_,
and columns had been devoted to it in various Mercian newspapers. After
years of silence, during which his heart had burned within him; after a
shorter period of growing propaganda and expanding utterance, Meynell
realized fully that he had now let loose the floodgates. All round him
was rising that wide response from human minds and hearts--whether in
sympathy or in hostility--which tests and sifts the man who aspires to be
a leader of men--in religion or economics. Every trade union leader
lifted on the wave of a great strike, representing the urgent physical
need of his fellows, knows what the concentration of human passion can
be--in matters concerned with the daily bread and the homes of men.
Religion can gather and bring to bear forces as strong. Meynell knew it
well; and he was like a man stepping down into a rushing stream from
which there is no escape. It must be crossed--that is all the wayfarer
knows; but as he feels the water on his body he realizes that the moment
is perhaps for life or death.

Such crises in life bring with them, in the case of the nobler
personalities, a great sensitiveness; and Meynell seemed to be living in
a world where not only his own inner feelings and motives but those of
others were magnified and writ large. As he walked beside Mary Elsmere
his mind played round what he knew of her history and position; and it
troubled him to think that, both for her and her mother, contact with him
at this particular moment might be the reviving of old sorrows.

As they paused on the top of a rising ground looking westward he looked
at her with sudden and kindly decision.

"Miss Elsmere, are you sure your mother would like to see me? It was very
good of you to request that I should accompany you to-night--but--are you
sure?"

Mary coloured deeply and hesitated a moment.

"Don't you think I'd better turn back?" he asked her, gently. "Your path
is clear before you." He pointed to it winding through the fern. "And you
know, I hope, that anything I could do for you and your mother during
your stay here I should be only too enchanted to do. The one thing I
shrink from doing is to interfere in any way with her rest here. And I am
afraid just now I might be a disturbing element."

"No, no! please come!" said Mary, earnestly. Then as she turned her head
away, she added: "Of course--there is nothing new--to her--"

"Except that my fight is waged from inside the Church--and your father's
from outside. But that might make all the difference to her."

"I don't think so. It is"--she faltered--"the change itself. It is all so
terrible to her."

"Any break with the old things? But doesn't it ever present itself to
her--force itself upon her--as the upwelling of a new life?" he asked,
sadly.

"Ah!--if it didn't in my father's case--"

The girl's eyes filled with tears.

But she quickly checked herself, and they moved on in silence. Meynell,
with his pastoral instinct and training, longed to probe and soothe the
trouble he divined in her. A great natural dignity in the girl--delicacy
of feeling in the man--prevented it.

None the less her betrayal of emotion had altered their relation; or
rather had carried it farther. For he had already seen her in contact
with tragic and touching things. A day or two after that early morning
when he had told the outlines of the Batesons' story to the two ladies
who had entertained him at breakfast he had found her in Bateson's
cottage with his wife. Bateson was dead, and his wife in that dumb,
automaton state of grief when the human spirit grows poisonous to itself.
The young girl who came and went with so few words and such friendly
timid ways had stirred, as it were, the dark air of the house with a
breath of tenderness. She would sit beside the widow, sewing at a black
dress, or helping her to choose the text to be printed on the funeral
card; or she would come with her hands full of wild flowers, and coax
Mrs. Bateson to go in the dusk to the churchyard with them. She had
shown, indeed, wonderful inventiveness in filling the first week of loss
and anguish with such small incident as might satisfy feeling, and yet
take a woman out of herself.

The level sun shone full upon her as she walked beside him, and her face,
her simple dress, her attitude stole gradually like a spell on the mind
of her companion. It was a remarkable face; the lower lip a little
prominent, and the chin firmly rounded. But the smile, though rare, was
youth and sweetness itself, and the dark eyes beneath the full mass of
richly coloured hair were finely conscious and attentive--disinterested
also; so that they won the spectator instead of embarrassing him. She was
very lightly and slenderly made, yet so as to convey an impression of
strength and physical health. Meynell said to himself that there was
something cloistered in her look, like one brought up in a grave
atmosphere--an atmosphere of "recollection." At the same time nothing
could be merrier--more childish even--than her laugh.

Their talk flowed on, from subject to subject, yet always tending,
whether they would or no, toward the matter which was inevitably in both
their minds. Insensibly the barrier between them and it broke away.
Neither, indeed, forgot the interposing shadow of Catharine Elsmere. But
the conversation touched on ideas; and ideas, like fire in stubble,
spread far afield. Oxford: the influences which had worked on Elsmere,
before Meynell's own youth felt them; men, books, controversies,
interwoven for Mary with her father's history, for Meynell with his own;
these topics, in spite of misgivings on both sides, could not but reveal
them to each other. The growing delight of their conversation was
presently beyond Meynell's resisting. And in Mary, the freedom of it, no
less than the sense of personal conflict and tragic possibilities that
lay behind it, awakened the subtlest and deepest feelings. Poignant,
concrete images rushed through her mind--a dying face to which her own
had been lifted, as a tiny child; the hall of the New Brotherhood, where
she sat sometimes beside her veiled mother; the sad nobility of that
mother's life; a score of trifling, heartpiercing things, that, to think
of, brought the sob to her throat. Silent revolts of her own too,
scattered along the course of her youth, revolts dumb, yet violent;
longings for an "ampler ether"--for the great tumultuous clash of thought
and doubt, of faith and denial, in a living and daring world. And yet
again, times of passionate remorse, in which all movement of revolt had
died away; when her only wish had been to smooth the path of her mother,
and to soften a misery she but dimly understood.

So that presently she was swept away--as by some released long-thwarted
force. And under the pressure of her quick, searching sympathy his talk
became insensibly more personal, more autobiographical. He was but little
given to confession, but she compelled it. It was as though through his
story she sought to understand her father's--to unveil many things yet
dark to her.

Thus gradually, through ways direct and indirect, the intellectual story
of the man revealed itself to the pure and sensitive mind of the girl.
She divined his home and upbringing--his father an Evangelical soldier of
the old school, a home imbued with the Puritan and Biblical ideas. She
understood something of the struggle provoked--after his ordination, in a
somewhat late maturity--by the uprising of the typical modern problems,
historical, critical, scientific. She pieced together much that only came
out incidentally as to the counsellors within the Church to whom he had
gone in his first urgent distress--the Bishop whom he reverenced--his
old teachers at Oxford--the new lights at Cambridge.

And the card houses, the frail resting-places, thus built, it seemed,
along the route, had lasted long; till at last a couple of small
French books by a French priest and the sudden uprush of new life
in the Roman Church had brought to the remote English clergyman at once
the crystallization of doubt and the passion of a freed faith.
"Modernism"--the attempt of the modern spirit, acting religiously, to
refashion Christianity, not outside, but _inside_, the warm limits of the
ancient churches--was born; and Richard Meynell became one of the first
converts in England.

"Ah, if your father had but lived!" he said at last, turning upon her
with emotion. "He died his noble death twenty years ago--think of the
difference between then and now! Then the Broad Church movement was
at an end. All that seemed so hopeful, so full of new life in the
seventies, had apparently died down. Stanley, John Richard Green, Hugh
Pearson were dead, Jowett was an old man of seventy; Liberalism within
the Church hardly seemed to breathe; the judgment in the Voysey case--as
much a defiance of modern knowledge as any Papal encyclical--though
people had nearly forgotten it, had yet in truth brought the whole
movement to a stand. All _within_ the gates seemed lost. Your father went
out into the wilderness, and there, amid everything that was poor and
mean and new, he laid down his life. But we!--we are no longer alone,
or helpless. The tide has come up to the stranded ship--the launching of
it depends now only on the faithfulness of those within it."

Mary was moved and silenced. The man's power, his transparent purity of
heart, affected her, as they had already affected thousands. She was
drawn to him also, unconsciously, by that something in personality which
determines the relations of men and women. Yet there were deep instincts
in her that protested. Girl as she was, she felt herself for the moment
more alive than he to the dead weight of the World, fighting the tug of
those who would fain move it from its ancient bases.

He seemed to guess at her thought; for he passed on to describe the
events by which, amid his own dumb or hidden struggle, he had become
aware of the same forces working all round him; among the more
intelligent and quick-witted miners, hungry for history and science,
reading voraciously a Socialist and anti-Christian literature, yet all
the while cherishing deep at heart certain primitive superstitions, and
falling periodically into hot abysses of Revivalism, under the influence
of Welsh preachers; or among the young men of the small middle class, in
whom a better education was beginning to awaken a number of new
intellectual and religious wants; among women, too, sensitive,
intelligent women--

"Ah! but," said Mary, quickly interrupting him, "don't imagine there are
many women like Miss Puttenham! There are very, very few!"

He turned upon her with surprise.

"I was not thinking of Miss Puttenham, I assure you. She has taken very
little part in this particular movement. I never know whether she is
really with us. She stands outside the old things, but I can never make
myself happy by the hope that I have been able to win her to the new!"

Mary looked puzzled--interrogative. But she checked her question, and
drew him back instead to his narrative--to the small incidents and signs
which had gradually revealed to him, among even his brother clergy, years
before that date, the working of ideas and thoughts like his own. And
now--

He broke off abruptly.

"You have heard of our meeting last week?"

"Of course!"

"There were men there from all parts of the diocese--and some from other
counties. It made me think of what a French Catholic Modernist said to me
two years ago--'Pius X may write encyclicals as he pleases--I could show
him whole dioceses in France that are practically Modernist, where the
Seminaries are Modernist, and two thirds of the clergy. The Bishop knows
it quite well, and is helpless. Over the border perhaps you get an
Ultramontane diocese, and an Ultramontane bishop. But the process goes
on. Life and time are for _us_!'" He paused and laughed. "Ah, of course I
don't pretend things are so here--yet. Our reforms in England--in Church
and State--broaden slowly down. In France, reform, when it moves at all,
tends to be catastrophic. But in the Markborough diocese alone we have
won over perhaps a fifth of the clergy, and the dioceses all round are
moving. As to the rapidity of the movement in the last few months it has
been nothing short of amazing!"

"And what is the end to be? Not only--oh! Not only--_to destroy_!" said
Mary. The soft intensity of the voice, the beauty of the look, touched
him strangely.

He smiled, and there was a silence for a minute, as they wandered
downward through a purple stretch of heather to a little stream,
sun-smitten, that lay across their path. Once or twice she looked at him
timidly, afraid lest she might have wounded him.

But at last he said:

"Shall I answer you in the words of a beloved poet?

"'What though there still need effort, strife?
Though much be still unwon?
Yet warm it mounts, the hour of life!
Death's frozen hour is done!

"'The world's great order dawns in sheen
After long darkness rude,
Divinelier imaged, clearer seen,
With happier zeal pursued.

"'What still of strength is left, employ,
_This_ end to help attain--
_One common wave of thought and joy
Lifting mankind again_!'

"There"--his voice was low and rapid--"_there_ is the goal! a new
_happiness_: to be reached through a new comradeship--a freer and yet
intenser fellowship. We want to say to our fellowmen: 'Cease from groping
among ruins!--from making life and faith depend upon whether Christ was
born at Bethlehem or at Nazareth, whether He rose or did not rise,
whether Luke or some one else wrote the Third Gospel, whether the Fourth
Gospel is history or poetry. The life-giving force is _here_, and _now_!
It is burning in your life and mine--as it burnt in the life of Christ.
Give all you have to the flame of it--let it consume the chaff and purify
the gold. Take the cup of cold water to the thirsty, heal the sick, tend
the dying, and feel it thrill within you--the ineffable, the immortal
life! Let the false miracle go!--the true has grown out of it, up from
it, as the flower from the sheath.' Ah! but then"--he drew himself up
unconsciously; his tone hardened--"we turn to the sons of tradition, and
we say: 'We too must have our rights in what the past has built up, the
past has bequeathed--as well as you! Not for you alone, the institutions,
the buildings, the arts, the traditions, that the Christ-life has so far
fashioned for itself. They who made them are Our fathers no less than
yours--give us our share in them!--we claim it! Give us our share in the
cathedrals and churches of our country--our share in the beauty and
majesty of our ancestral Christianity.' The men who led the rebellion
against Rome in the sixteenth century claimed the _plant_ of English
Catholicism. 'We are our fathers' sons, and these things are _ours!_'
they said, as they looked at Salisbury and Winchester. We say the
same--with a difference. 'Give us the rights and the citizenship that
belong to us! But do not imagine that we want to attack yours. In God's
name, follow your own forms of faith--but allow us ours also--within
the common shelter of the common Church. We are children of the same
God--followers of the same Master. Who made you judges and dividers over
us? You shall not drive us into the desert any more. A new movement of
revolt has come--an hour of upheaval--and the men, with it!'"

Both stood motionless, gazing over the wide stretch of country--wood
beyond wood, distance beyond distance, that lay between them and the
Welsh border. Suddenly, as a shaft of light from the descending sun
fled ghostlike across the plain, touching trees and fields and farms in
its path, two noble towers emerged among the shadows--characters, as it
were, that gave a meaning to the scroll of nature. They were the towers
of Markborough Cathedral. Meynell pointed to them as he turned to his
companion, his face still quivering under the strain of feeling.

"Take the omen! It is for _them_, in a sense--a spiritual sense--we are
fighting. They belong not to any body of men that may chance to-day to
call itself the English Church. They belong to _England_--in her aspect
of faith--and to the English people!"

There was a silence. His look came back to her face, and the prophetic
glow died from his own. "I should be very, very sorry"--he said
anxiously--"if anything I have said had given you pain."

Mary shook her head.

"No--not to me. I--I have my own thoughts. But one must think--of
others." Her voice trembled.

The words seemed to suggest everything that in her own personal history
had stamped her with this sweet, shrinking look. Meynell was deeply
touched. But he did not answer her, or pursue the conversation any
farther. He gathered a great bunch of harebells for her, from the
sun-warmed dells in the heather; and was soon making her laugh by his
stories of colliery life and speech, _a propos_ of the colliery villages
fringing the plain at their feet.

* * * * *

The stream, as they neared it, proved to be the boundary between the
heath land and the pastures of the lower ground. It ran fresh and
brimming between its rushy banks, shadowed here and there by a few light
ashes and alders, but in general open to the sky, of which it was the
mirror. It shone now golden and blue under the deepening light of the
afternoon; and two or three hundred yards away Mary Elsmere distinguished
two figures walking beside it--a young man apparently, and a girl.
Meynell looked at them absently.

"That's one of the most famous trout-streams in the Midlands. There
should be a capital rise to-night. If that man has the sense to put on a
sedge-fly, he'll get a creel-full."

"And what is that house among the trees?" asked his companion presently,
pointing to a gray pile of building about a quarter of a mile away, on
the other side of the stream. "What a wonderful old place!"

For the house that revealed itself stood with an impressive dignity among
its stern and blackish woods. The long, plain front suggested a monastic
origin; and there was indeed what looked like a ruined chapel at one end.
Its whole aspect was dilapidated and forlorn; and yet it seemed to have
grown into the landscape, and to be so deeply rooted in it that one could
not imagine it away.

Meynell glanced at it.

"That is Sandford Abbey. It belongs, I regret to say, to a neer-do-weel
cousin of mine who has spent all his time since he came into it in
neglecting his duties to it. Provided the owner of it is safely away, I
should advise you and Mrs. Elsmere to walk over and see it one day.
Otherwise it is better viewed at a distance. At least those are my own
sentiments!"

Mary followed the house with her eyes as they walked along the bank of
the stream toward the two figures on the opposite bank.

A sudden exclamation from her companion caught her ear--and a light
musical laugh. Startled by something familiar in it, Mary looked across
the stream. She saw on the farther bank a few yards ahead a young man
fishing, and a young girl in white sitting beside him.

"Hester!--Miss Fox-Wilton!"--the tone showed her surprise; "and who is
that with her?"

Meynell, without replying, walked rapidly along the stream to a point
immediately opposite the pair.

"Good afternoon, Philip. I did not know you were here. Hester, I am going
round by Forked Pond, and then home. I shall be glad to escort you."

"Oh! thank you--thank you _so_ much. But it's very nice here. You can't
think what a rise there is. I have caught two myself. Sir Philip has been
teaching me."

"She frames magnificently!" said the young man. "How d'ye do, Meynell? A
long time since we've met."

"A long time," said Meynell briefly. "Hester, will you meet Miss Elsmere
and me at the bridge? We sha'n't take you much out of your way."

He pointed to a tiny wooden bridge across the stream, a hundred yards
farther down.

A look of mischievous defiance was flung at Meynell across the stream.
"I'm all right, I assure you. Don't bother about me. How do you do, Mary?
We don't 'miss' each other, do we? Isn't it a lovely evening? Such good
luck I wouldn't go with mother to dine at the White House! Don't you hate
dinner parties? I told Mr. Barron that spiders were so much more refined
than humans--they did at least eat their flies by themselves! He was
quite angry--and I am afraid Stephen was too!"

She laughed again, and so did the man beside her. He was a dark, slim
fellow, finely made, dressed in blue serge, and a felt hat, which
seemed at the moment to be slipping over the back of his handsome head.
From a little distance he produced an impression of Apollo-like strength
and good looks. As the spectator came closer, this impression was a good
deal modified by certain loose and common lines in the face. But from
Mary Elsmere's position only Sir Philip Meryon's good points were
visible, and he appeared to her a dazzling creature.

And in point of looks his companion was more than his match. They made
indeed a brilliant pair, framed amid the light green of the river bank.
Hester Fox-Wilton was sitting on a log with her straw hat on her lap. In
pushing along the overgrown stream, the coils of her hair had been
disarranged and its combs loosened. The hair was of a warm brown shade,
and it made a cloud about her headland face, from which her eyes and
smile shone out triumphantly. Exceptionally tall, with clear-cut aquiline
features, with the movements and the grace of a wood nymph, the girl
carried her beautiful brows and her full throat with a provocative and
self-conscious arrogance. One might have guessed that fear was unknown
to her; perhaps tenderness also. She looked much older than seventeen,
until she moved or spoke; then the spectator soon realized that in spite
of her height and her precocious beauty she was a child, capable still of
a child's mischief.

And on mischief she was apparently bent this afternoon. Mary Elsmere,
shyly amused, held aloof, while Meynell and Miss Fox-Wilton talked across
the stream. Meynell's peremptory voice reached her now and then, and she
could not help hearing a sharp final demand that the truant should
transfer herself at once to his escort.

The girl threw him an odd look; she sprang to her feet, flushed, laughed,
and refused.

"Very well!" said Meynell. "Then perhaps, as you won't join us, you will
allow me to join you. Miss Elsmere, I am very sorry, but I am afraid I
must put off my visit to your mother. Will you give her my regrets?"

The fury in Hester's look deepened. She lost her smile.

"I won't be watched and coerced! Why shouldn't I amuse myself as I
please!"

Meanwhile Sir Philip Meryon had laid aside his rod and was apparently
enjoying the encounter between his companion and the Rector.

"Perhaps you have forgotten--this is _my_ side of the river, Meynell!" he
shouted across it.

"I am quite aware of it," said the Rector, as he shook hands with the
embarrassed Mary. She was just moving away with a shy good-bye to the
angry young goddess on the farther bank, when the goddess said:

"Don't go, Mary! Here, Sir Philip--take the fly-book!" She flung it
toward him. "Goodnight."

And turning her back upon him without any further ceremony, she walked
quickly along the stream toward the little bridge which Meynell had
pointed out.

"Congratulations!" said Meryon, with a mocking wave of the hand to the
Rector, who made no reply. He ran to catch up Mary, and the two joined
the girl in white at the bridge. The owner of Sandford Abbey stood
meanwhile with his hand on his hip watching the receding figures. There
was a smile on his handsome mouth, but it was an angry one; and his
muttered remark as he turned away belied the unconcern he had affected.

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