The Case of Richard Meynell Part 17

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" a.s.sembled, 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 cla.s.s-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 Cla.s.sic, 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; Pet.i.tot, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.e.x 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 repet.i.tion--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 pa.s.sing 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 circ.u.mstances 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 leaf.a.ge 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 pa.s.sionate. 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 ent.i.tled 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 a.s.sailed him.

He paused a moment among the trees, just before the cottage pa.s.sed out of sight. The sun was sinking in a golden haze, the first prophecy of autumnal mists. Broad lights lay here and there upon the water, to be lost again in depths of shadow, wherein woods of dream gave back the woods that stooped to them from the sh.o.r.e. Everything was so still he could hear the fish rising, the run of a squirrel along a branch, the pa.s.sage of a coot through the water.

The very profoundity of nature's peace suddenly showed him to himself. A man engaged in a struggle beyond his power!--committed to one of those tasks that rend and fever the human spirit even while they enn.o.ble it! He had talked boldly to Stephen and the Bishop of "war"--"inevitable" and "necessary war." At the same time there was no one who would suffer from war more than he. The mere daily practice of Christianity, as a man's life-work, is a daily training in sensitiveness, involves a daily refining of the nerves. When a man so trained, so refined, takes up the public tasks of leadership and organization, in this noisy, hard-hitting world, his nature is set at enmity with itself. Meynell did not yet know whether the mystic in him would allow the fighter in him to play his part.

If the memory of Fenton's cold, unrecognizing eyes and rigid mouth, as they pa.s.sed each other in the silence of the Cathedral, had power to cause so deep a stab of pain, how was he to brace himself in the future to what must come?--the alienation of friend after friend, the condemnation of the good, the tumult, the poisoned feeling, the abuse, public and private.

Only by the help of that Power behind the veil of things, perceived by the mind of faith! "_Thou, Thou art being and breath_!--Thine is this truth, which, like a living hand, bridles and commands me. Grind my life as corn in Thy mill!--but forsake me not! Nay, Thou wilt not, Thou canst not forsake me!"

No hope for a man attempting such an enterprise as Meynell's but in this simplicity, this pa.s.sion of self-surrender. Without it no adventure in the spiritual fight has ever touched and fired the heart of man. Meynell was sternly and simply aware of it.

But how is this temper, this pa.s.sion, kindled?

The answer flashed. Everywhere the divine ultimate Power mediates itself through the earthly elements and forces, speaks through small, childish things, incarnates itself in lover, wife, or friend--flashing its mystic fire through the web of human relations. It seemed to Meynell, as he stood in the evening stillness by the pond, hidden from sight by the light brushwood round him, that, absorbed as he had been from his youth in the symbolism and pa.s.sion of the religious life, as other men are absorbed in art or science, he had never really understood one of these great words by which he imagined himself to live--Love, or Endurance, or Sacrifice, or Joy--because he had never known the most sacred, the most intimate, things of human life out of which they grow.

And there uprose in him a sudden yearning--a sudden flame of desire--for the revealing love of wife and child. As it thrilled through him, he seemed to be looking down into the eyes--so frank, so human--of Mary Elsmere.

Then while he watched, lost in feeling, yet instinctively listening for any movement in the wood, there was a flicker of white among the trees opposite. A girl, book in hand, came down to the water's edge, and paused there a little, watching the glow of sunset on the water. Meynell retreated farther into the wood; but he was still able to see her.

Presently she sat down, propping herself against a tree, and began to read.

Her presence, the grace of her bending neck, informed the silence of the woods with life and charm. Meynell watched her a few moments in a trance of pleasure. But memory broke in upon the trance and scattered all his pleasure. What reasonable hope of winning the daughter of that quiet, indomitable woman, who, at their first meeting, had shown him with such icy gentleness the gulf between himself and them?

And yet between himself and Mary he knew that there was no gulf.

Spiritually she was her father's child, and not her mother's.

But to suppose that she would consent to bring back into her mother's life the same tragic conflict, in new form, which had already rent and seared it, was madness. He read his dismissal in her quiet avoidance of him ever since she had been a witness of her mother's manner toward him.

No. Such a daughter would never inflict a second sorrow, of the same kind, on such a mother. Meynell bowed his head, and went slowly away. It was as though he left youth and all delightfulness behind him, in the deepening dusk of the woods.