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The Case of Richard Meynell by Mrs. Humphry Ward

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> The Case of Richard Meynell




"You have done a noble work for your people, Meynell." The Bishop's voice
was not unlike a groan.

"I have done nothing but what was my bounden duty to do."

"And practically your parish is with you in this terrible business?"

"The church people in it, by an immense majority--and some of the
dissenters. Mr. Barron, as you know, is the chief complainant, and there
are of course some others with him."

"I expect to see Mr. Barron this afternoon," remarked the Bishop,
frowning.

Meynell said nothing.

The Bishop rose.

"I understand from your letter this morning that you have no intention of
repeating the service of last Sunday?"

"Not at present. But the League will go to work at once on a revised
service-book."

"Which you propose to introduce on a given Sunday--in all the Reformers'
churches?"

"That is our plan."

"You are quite aware that this whole scheme may lead to tumults--breaches
of the peace?"

"It may," said Meynell reluctantly.

"But you risk it?"

"We must," said Meynell, after a pause.

"And you refuse--I ask you once more--to resign your living, at my
request?"

"I do--for the reasons I have given."

The Bishop's eyes sparkled.

"As to my course," he said, dryly, "Letters of Request will be sent at
once to the Court of Arches preferring charges of heretical teaching and
unauthorized services against yourself and two other clergy. I shall be
represented by so-and-so." He named the lawyers.

They stood, exchanging a few technical informations of this kind for a
few minutes. Then Meynell took up his hat. The Bishop hesitated a moment,
then held out his hand.

Meynell grasped it, and suddenly stooped and kissed the episcopal ring.

"I am an old man"--said the Bishop brokenly--"and a weary one. I pray God
that He will give me strength to bear this burden that is laid upon me."

Meynell went away, with bowed head. The Bishop was left alone. He moved
to the window and stood looking out. Across the green of the quadrangle
rose the noble mass of the Cathedral. His lips moved in prayer; but all
the time it was as though he saw beside the visible structure--its
ordered beauty, its proud and cherished antiquity--a ruined phantom of
the great church, roofless and fissured, its sacred places open to the
winds and rains, its pavements broken and desolate.

The imagination grew upon him, and it was only with a great effort that
he escaped from it.

"My bogies are as foolish as Barbara's," he said to himself with a smile
as he went back to the daily toil of his letters.




CHAPTER VI


Meynell left the Palace shaken and exhausted. He carried in his mind the
image of his Bishop, and he walked in bitterness of soul. The quick,
optimistic imagination which had alone made the action of these last
weeks possible had for the moment deserted him, and he was paying the
penalty of his temperament.

He turned into the Cathedral, and knelt there some time, conscious less
of articulate prayer than of the vague influences of the place; the warm
gray of its shadows, the relief of its mere space and silence, the beauty
of the creeping sunlight--gules, or, and purple--on the spreading
pavements. And vaguely--while the Bishop's grief still, as it were,
smarted within his own heart--there arose the sense that he was the mere
instrument of a cause; that personal shrinking and compunction were not
allowed him; that he was the guardian of nascent rights and claims far
beyond anything affecting his own life. Some such conviction is essential
to the religious leader--to the enthusiast indeed of any kind; and it was
not withheld from Richard Meynell.

When he rose and went out, he saw coming toward him a man he knew
well--Fenton, the Vicar of a church on the outskirts of Markborough,
famous for its "high" doctrine and services; a young boyish fellow, curly
haired, in whom the "gayety" that Catholicism, Anglican or Roman,
prescribes to her most devout children was as conspicuous as an ascetic
and labourious life. Meynell loved and admired him. At a small clerical
meeting the two men had once held an argument that had been long
remembered--Fenton maintaining hotly the doctrine of an intermediate
and purgatorical state after death, basing it entirely on a vision of
Saint Perpetua recorded in the Acta of that Saint. Impossible, said the
fair-haired, frank-eyed priest--who had been one of the best wicket-keeps
of his day at Winchester--that so solemn a vision, granted to a martyr,
at the moment almost of death, could be misleading. Purgatory therefore
must be accepted and believed, even though it might not be expedient to
proclaim it publicly from an Anglican pulpit. "Since the evening when I
first read the Acta of SS. Perpetua and Felicitas," said the speaker,
with an awed sincerity, "I have never doubted for myself, nor have I
dared to hide from my penitents what is my own opinion."

In reply, Meynell, instead of any general argument, had gently taken the
very proof offered him--_i.e.,_ the vision--dissecting it, the time in
which it arose, and the mind in which it occurred, with a historical
knowledge and a quick and tender penetration which had presently absorbed
the little company of listeners, till Fenton said abruptly, with a frown
of perplexity:

"In that way, one might explain anything--the Transfiguration for
instance--or Pentecost."

Meynell looked up quickly.

"Except--the mind that dies for an idea!"

Yet the encounter had left them friends; and the two men had been
associated not long afterward in a heroic attempt to stop some dangerous
rioting arising out of a strike in one of the larger collieries.

Meynell watched the young figure of Fenton approaching through the bands
of light and shadow in the great nave. As it came nearer, some instinct
made him stand still, as though he became the mere spectator of what was
about to happen. Fenton lifted his head; his eyes met Meynell's, and,
without the smallest recognition, his gaze fixed on the pavement, he
passed on toward the east end of the Cathedral.

Meynell straightened himself for a minute's "recollection," and went his
way. On the pavement outside the western portal he ran into another
acquaintance--a Canon of the Cathedral--hurrying home to lunch from a
morning's work in the Cathedral library. Canon France looked up, saw who
it was, and Meynell, every nerve strained to its keenest, perceived the
instant change of expression. But there was no ignoring him, though the
Canon did not offer to shake hands.

"Ah! Meynell, is that you? A fine day at last!"

"Yes, we may save the harvest yet!" said Meynell, pausing in his walk.

A kind of nervous curiosity bade him try and detain the Canon. But
France--a man of sixty-five, with a large Buddha-like face, and a pair of
remarkably shrewd and humorous black eyes--looked him quickly over from
top to toe, and hurried on, throwing a "good-bye" over his shoulder. When
he and Meynell had last met it had been to talk for a friendly hour over
Monseigneur Duchesne's last book and its bearing on Ultramontane
pretensions; and they had parted with a cordial grip of the hand,
promising soon to meet again.

"Yet he knew me for a heretic then!" thought Meynell. "I never made any
secret of my opinions."

All the same, as he walked on, he forced himself to acknowledge to the
full the radical change in the situation. Acts of war suspend the normal
order; and no combatant has any right to complain.

Then a moment's weariness seized him of the whole train of thought to
which his days and nights were now committed, and he turned with
eagerness to look at the streets of Markborough, full of a market-day
crowd, and of "the great mundane movement." Farmers and labourers were
walking up and down; oxen and sheep in the temporary pens of the
market-place were waiting for purchasers; there was a Socialist lecturer
in one corner, and a Suffragist lady on a wagon in another. The late
August sun shone upon the ruddy faces and broad backs of men to whom
certainly it did not seem to be of great importance whether the
Athanasian Creed were omitted from the devotions of Christian people or
no. There was a great deal of chaffering going on; a little courting, and
some cheating. Meynell recognized some of his parishioners, spoke to a
farmer or two, exchanged greeting with a sub-agent of the miners' union,
and gave some advice to a lad of his choir who had turned against the
pits and come to "hire" himself at Markborough.

It was plain to him, however, after a little, that although he might wish
to forget himself among the crowd, the crowd was on the contrary rather
sharply aware of the Rector of Upcote. He perceived as he moved slowly up
the street that he was in fact a marked man. Looks followed him; and the
men he knew greeted him with a difference.

A little beyond the market-place he turned down a narrow street leading
to the mother church of the town--an older foundation even than the
Cathedral. Knocking at the door in the wall, he was admitted to an old
rectory house, adjacent to the church, and in its low-ceiled dining-room
he found six of the already famous "eighteen" assembled, among them the
two other clergy who with himself had been singled out for the first
testing prosecution. A joint letter was being drawn up for the press.

Meynell was greeted with rejoicing--a quiet rejoicing, as of men occupied
with grave matters, that precluded any ebullience of talk. With Meynell's
appearance, the meeting became more formal, and it was proposed to put
the Vicar of the ancient church under whose shadow they were gathered,
into the chair. The old man, Treherne by name, had been a double-first in
days when double-firsts were everything, and in a class-list not much
more modern than Mr. Gladstone's. He was a gentle, scholarly person,
silent and timid in ordinary life, and his adhesion to the "eighteen" had
been an astonishment to friends and foes. But he was not to be inveigled
into the "chair" on any occasion, least of all in his own dining-room.

"I should keep you here all night, and you would get nothing done,"
he said with a smiling wave of the hand. "Besides--_excludat jurgia
finis!_--let there be an age-limit in all things! Put Meynell in. It is
he that has brought us all into this business."

So, for some hours or more, Meynell and the six grappled with the letter
that was to convey the challenge of the revolted congregations to the
general public through the _Times_. It was not an easy matter, and some
small jealousies and frictions lifted their heads that had been wholly
lost sight of in the white-hot feeling of the inauguration meeting.

Yet on the whole the seven men gathered in this room were not unworthy to
lead the "forlorn hope" they had long determined on. Darwen--young,
handsome, Spiritual, a Third Classic, and a Chancellor's medallist;
Waller, his Oxford friend, a man of the same type, both representing the
recent flowing back of intellectual forces into the Church which for
nearly half a century had abandoned her; Petitot, Swiss by origin, small,
black-eyed, irrepressible, with a great popularity among the hosiery
operatives of whom his parish was mainly composed; Derrick, the
Socialist, of humble origin and starved education, yet possessed
Of a natural sway over men, given him by a pair of marvellous blue
eyes, a character of transparent simplicity, a tragic honesty and the
bitter-sweet gift of the orator; Chesham, a man who had left the army for
the Church, had been grappling for ten years with a large parish of
secularist artisans, and was now preaching Modernism with a Franciscan
fervour and success; and Rollin, who owned a slashing literary style, was
a passionate Liberal in all fields, had done excellent work in the
clearing and cleaning of slums, with much loud and unnecessary talk by
the way, and wrote occasionally for the _Daily Watchman_. Chesham and
Darwen were Meynell's co-defendants in the suit brought by the Bishop.

Rollin alone seemed out of place in this gathering of men, drawing tense
breath under a new and almost unbearable responsibility. He was so in
love with the sensational, notoriety side of the business, so eager to
pull wires, and square editors, so frankly exultant in the "big row"
coming on, that Meynell, with the Bishop's face still in his mind, could
presently hardly endure him. He felt as Renan toward Gavroche. Was it
worth while to go through so much that Rollin might cut a figure, and
talk at large about "modern thought?"

However Darwen and Waller, Derrick also, were just as determined as
Meynell to keep down the frothy self-advertising element in the campaign
to the minimum that human nature seems unable to do without. So that
Rollin found himself gradually brought into line, being not a bad fellow,
but only a common one; and he abandoned with much inward chagrin the
project of a flaming "interview" for the _Daily Watchman_ on the
following day.

And indeed, as this handful of men settled down to the consideration of
the agenda for a large conference to be held in Markborough the following
week, there might have been discerned in six of them, at least, a temper
that glorified both them and their enterprise; a temper of seriousness,
courage, unalterable conviction, with such delicacy of feeling as befits
men whose own brethren and familiar companions have become their foes.
They were all pastors in the true sense, and every man of them knew that
in a few months he would probably have lost his benefice and his
prospects. Only Treherne was married, and only he and Rollin had private
means.

Meynell was clearly their leader. Where the hopefulness of the others was
intermittent his was constant; his knowledge of the English situation
generally, as well as of the lie of forces in the Markborough district,
was greater than theirs; and his ability as a writer made him their
natural exponent. It was he who drew up the greater part of their
"encyclical" for the press; and by the time the meeting was over he had
so heightened in them the sense of mission, so cheered them with the
vision of a wide response from the mind of England, that all lesser
thoughts were sunk, and they parted in quietness and courage.

Meynell left the outskirts of Markborough by the Maudeley road, meaning
to walk to Upcote by Forked Pond and Maudeley Park.

It was now nearly a fortnight since he had seen Mary Elsmere, and for the
first time, almost, in these days of storm and stress could the mind make
room for some sore brooding on the fact. He had dined at Maudeley, making
time with infinite difficulty; Mrs. Elsmere and her daughter were not
there. He had asked Mrs. Flaxman to tea at the Rectory, and had suggested
that she should bring her sister and her niece. Mr. and Mrs. Flaxman
appeared--without companions. Once or twice he had caught sight of Mary
Elsmere's figure in the distance of Miss Puttenham's garden. Yet he had
not ventured to intrude upon the two friends. It had seemed to him by
then it must be her will to avoid him, and he respected it.

As to other misgivings and anxieties, they were many. As Meynell entered
the Maudeley lane, with the woods of Sandford Abbey on his left, and the
little trout-stream flashing and looping through the water meadows on his
right, his mind was often occupied by a conversation between himself and
Stephen Barron which had taken place the night before. Meynell could not
but think of it remorsefully.

"And I can explain nothing--to make it easier for the poor old
fellow--nothing! He thinks if we had allowed the engagement, it would
all have come right--he would have got a hold upon her, and been able to
shape her. Oh, my dear boy--my dear boy! Yet, when the time comes,
Stephen shall have any chance, any help, I can give him--unless indeed
she has settled her destiny for herself by then, without any reference
to us. And Stephen shall know--what there is to know!"

As to Hester herself, she seemed to have been keeping the Fox-Wilton
household in perpetual fear. She went about in her mocking, mysterious
way, denying that she knew anything about Sir Philip Meryon, or had any
dealings with him. Yet it was shrewdly suspected that letters had passed
between them, and Hester's proceedings were so quick-silverish and
incalculable that it was impossible to keep a constant watch upon her. In
the wilderness of Maudeley Park, which lay directly between the two
houses, they might quite well have met--they probably had met. Meynell
noticed and rebuked in himself a kind of settled pessimism as to Hester's
conduct and future. "Do what you will," it seemed to say--"do all you
can--but that life has in it the ferments of tragedy."

Had they at least been doing all they could? he asked himself anxiously,
vowing that no public campaign must or should distract him from a private
trust much older than it, and no less sacred. In the midst of the turmoil
of these weeks he had been corresponding on Lady Fox-Wilton's behalf with
a lady in Paris to whom a girl of Hester's age and kind might be safely
committed for the perfecting of her French and music. It had been
necessary to warn the lady that in the case of such a pensionnaire as
Hester the male sex might give trouble; and Hester had not yet signified
her gracious consent to go.

But she would go--she must go--and either he or Alice Puttenham would
take her over and install her. Good heavens, if one had only Edith
Fox-Wilton to depend on in these troubles!

As for Philip Meryon, he was, of course, now and always, a man of vicious
habits and no scruples. He seemed to be staying at Sandford with the
usual crew of flashy, disreputable people, and to allow Hester to run any
risks with regard to him would be simply criminal. Yet with so
inefficient a watch-dog as Lady Fox-Wilton, who could guarantee anything?
Alice, of course, thought of nothing else than Hester, night and day. But
it was part of the pathos of the situation that she had so little
influence on the child's thoughts and deeds.

Poor, lonely woman! In Alice's sudden friendship for Mary Elsmere, her
junior by some twelve years, the Rector, with an infinite pity, read the
confession of a need that had become at last intolerable. For these
seventeen years he had never known her make an intimate friend, and to
see her now with this charming, responsive girl was to realize what the
long hunger for affection must have been. Yet even now, how impossible to
satisfy it, as other women could satisfy it! What ghosts and shadows
about the path of friendship!

"A dim and perilous way," his mind went sounding back along the
intricacies of Alice Puttenham's story. The old problems arose in
connection with it--problems now of ethics, now of expediency. And
interfused with them a sense of dull amazement and yet of intolerable
repetition--in this difficulty which had risen with regard to Hester. The
owner of Sandford--_and Hester!_ When he had first seen them together, it
had seemed a thing so sinister that his mind had refused to take it
seriously. A sharp word to her, a word of warning to her natural
guardians--and surely all was mended. Philip never stayed more than three
weeks in the old house; he would very soon be gone, and Hester's fancy
would turn to something else.

But that the passing shock should become anything more! There rose before
Meynell's imagination a vision of the two by the river, not in the actual
brightness of the August afternoon, but bathed, as it were, in angry
storm-light; behind them, darkness, covering "old, unhappy, far-off
things." From that tragical gloom it seemed as though their young figures
had but just emerged, unnaturally clear; and yet the trailing clouds were
already threatening the wild beauty of the girl.

He blamed himself for lack of foresight. It should have been utterly
impossible for those two to meet! Meryon generally appeared at Sandford
three times a year, for various sporting purposes. Hester might easily
have been sent away during these descents. But the fact was she had grown
up so rapidly--yesterday a mischievous child, to-day a woman in her first
bloom--that they had all been taken by surprise. Besides, who could have
imagined any communication whatever between the Fox-Wilton household and
the riotous party at Sandford Abbey?

As to the girl herself, Meynell was always conscious of being engaged in
some long struggle to save and protect his ward against her will. There
were circumstances connected with Hester that should have stirred in the
few people who knew them a special softness of heart in regard to her.
But it was not easy to feel it. The Rector had helped two women to watch
over her upbringing; he had brought her to her first communion, and tried
hard, and quite in vain, to instil into her the wholesome mysticisms of
the Christian faith; and the more efforts he made, the more sharply was
he aware of the hard, egotistical core of the girl's nature, of Hester's
fatal difference from other girls.

And yet, as he thought of her with sadness and perplexity, there came
across him the memory of Mrs. Elsmere's sudden movement toward Hester;
how she had drawn the child to her and kissed her--she, so unearthly
and so spiritual, whose very aspect showed her the bondswoman of Christ.

The remembrance rebuked him, and he fell into fresh plans about the
child. She must be sent away at once!--and if there were really any sign
of entanglement he must himself go to Sandford and beard Philip in his
den. There was knowledge in his possession that might be used to frighten
the fellow. He thought of his cousin with loathing and contempt.

But--to do him justice--Meryon knew nothing of those facts that gave such
an intolerable significance to any contact whatever between his
besmirched life and that of Hester Fox-Wilton.

Meryon knew nothing--and Stephen knew nothing--nor the child herself.
Meynell shared his knowledge with only two other persons--no!--three.
Was that woman, that troublesome, excitable woman, whose knowledge had
been for years the terror of three lives--was she alive still? Ralph
Fox-Wilton had originally made it well worth her while to go to the
States. That was in the days when he was prepared to pay anything. Then
for years she had received an allowance, which, however, Meynell believed
had stopped sometime before Sir Ralph's death. Meynell remembered that
the stopping of it had caused some friction between Ralph and his wife.
Lady Fox-Wilton had wished it continued. But Ralph had obstinately
refused to pay any more. Nothing had been heard of her, apparently, for a
long while. But she had still a son and grand-children living in Upcote
village.

* * * * *

Meynell opened the gate leading into the Forked Pond enclosure. The pond
had been made by the damming of part of the trout stream at the point
where it entered the Maudeley estate, and the diversion of the rest to a
new channel. The narrow strip of land between the pond and the new
channel made a little waterlocked kingdom of its own for the cottage,
which had been originally a fishing hut, built in an Izaak Walton-ish
mood by one of the owners of Maudeley. But the public footpath through
the park ran along the farther side of the pond, and the doings of the
inhabitants of the cottage, thick though the leafage was, could sometimes
be observed from it.

Involuntarily Meynell's footsteps lingered as the little thatched
house became visible, its windows set wide to the sounds and scents of
the September day. There was conveyed to him a sense of its warm
loneliness in the summer nights, of the stars glimmering upon it through
the trees, of the owls crying round it. And within--in one of those upper
rooms--those soft deep eyes, at rest in sleep?--or looking out, perhaps,
into the breathing glooms of the wood?--the sweet face propped on the
slender hand.

He felt certain that the inner life of such a personality as Mary Elsmere
was rich and passionate. Sometimes, in these lonely hours, did she think
of the man who had told her so much of himself on that, to him, memorable
walk? Meynell looked back upon the intimate and autobiographical talk
into which he had been led, with some wonder and a hot cheek. He had
confessed himself partly to Elsmere's daughter, on a hint of sympathy, as
to one entitled to such a confidence, so to speak, by inheritance, should
she desire it; but still more--he owned it--to a delightful woman. It was
the first time in Meynell's strenuous life, filled to the brim with
intellectual and speculative effort on the one hand, and with the care
of his parish on the other, that he had been conscious of any such
feeling as now possessed him. In his first manhood it had been impossible
for him to marry, because he had his brothers to educate. And when they
were safely out in the world the Rector, absorbed in the curing of sick
bodies and the saving of sick souls, could not dream of spending the
money thus set free on a household for himself.

He had had his temptations of the flesh, his gusts of inclination, like
other men. But he had fought them down victoriously, for conscience sake;
and it was long now since anything of the sort had assailed him.

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An intricate, kaleidoscopic, all-embracing history of 20th-century music from Mahler to La Monte Young is the winner of this year's Guardian first book award. Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise was the clear and undisputed winner of the £10,000 prize, which has been presented at a ceremony in central London tonight.

The chair of the judging panel, Guardian literary editor Claire Armitstead, said: "In some quarters this book has been seen as not having a popular appeal. Our prize – which, uniquely, relies on readers' groups in the early stages of judging – proves that, on the contrary, there is a huge appetite among readers for clear, serious but accessible books."

According to one judge: "Where Ross lifts his book above the 'expert' and impressive to the 'good read' category is in the way he wears his learning lightly, never clutches for false or contrived ways of explaining music, and never dumbs down in order to explain."

One of the members of the Waterstone's reading groups, who helped in the judging process, said: "Every time I felt overwhelmed by the technicalities, along came a sublime metaphor or simile that would light up the prose."

Ross, who is the music critic of the New Yorker, has distilled a lifetime's enthusiasm and learning into a rich narrative of musical history, setting the works of Mahler, Schoenberg, John Cage and the rest into their cultural and political contexts – but also giving a vivid sense of what the music he describes actually sounds and feels like.

Of all the artforms, modern and contemporary classical music is often seen as the most rebarbative. Ross brushes aside the mythology of 20th-century music's "inaccessibility" as he charts its meandering histories. Along the way, fascinating connections are made: hip-hop has more in common with Janacek than you might think; Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were tennis partners; Gershwin, in turn, was an ardent fan of Alban Berg and kept an autographed photo of the composer of Lulu in his apartment. If there is an overarching idea to the book, it is perhaps contained in Berg's pronouncement to Gershwin: "Mr Gershwin, music is music."

Ross, 40, was born in Washington DC, and studied English and history at Harvard. An enthusiastic teenage musician and student broadcaster, he began writing music criticism after university and in 1996 was appointed music critic of the New Yorker. His blog – also called The Rest Is Noise – has been a trailblazer in harnessing the internet as a way of amplifying (often literally) his writing on music.

The New York Review of Books described The Rest Is Noise as "by far the liveliest and smartest popular introduction yet written to a century of diverse music". The Economist noted: "No other critic writing in English can so effectively explain why you like a piece, or beguile you to reconsider it, or prompt you to hurry online and buy a recording."

Nicholas Kenyon, managing director of the Barbican and a former Observer music critic, said: "At a time when people are still talking about 20th-century music as if it were a problem, here is a lucid and entertaining book about what I regard as some of the greatest music ever written. It's a wonderful way to advance the cause of 20th-century music to an ordinary, intelligent general reader. It's the ideal mix of enthusiasm and information."

This year's judging panel comprised novelist Roddy Doyle; broadcaster and novelist Francine Stock; poet Daljit Nagra; the historian David Kynaston; novelist Kate Mosse and Guardian deputy editor, Katharine Viner. Stuart Broom of Waterstone's also joined the deliberations, speaking as the representative of the readers' groups.

The other books on the shortlist were Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes; Ross Raisin's God's Own Country; Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole (which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker prize) and Owen Matthews's Stalin's Children.

Previous winners of the prize have included Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters (2005) and Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000).

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