The Case of Richard Meynell Part 25

Meynell came in, rather hastily, brushing his hair back from his forehead. He shook hands with the Dean and the Archdeacon, and bowed to the other members of the commission. As he sat down, the Archdeacon, who was very sensitive to such things, and was himself a model of spick-and-span-ness, noticed that the Rector's coat was frayed, and one of the b.u.t.tons loose. Anne indeed was not a very competent valet of her master; and nothing but a certain esthetic element in Meynell preserved him from a degree of personal untidiness which might perhaps have been excused in a man alternating, hour by hour, between his study-table and the humblest practical tasks among his people.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "He shook hands with the Dean"]

The other members of the commission observed him attentively. Perhaps all in their different ways and degrees were conscious of change in him: the change wrought insensibly in a man by some high pressure of emotion and responsibility--the change that makes a man a leader of his fellows, consecrates and sets him apart. Canon Dornal watched him with a secret sympathy and pity. The Archdeacon said to himself with repugnance that Meynell now had the look of a fanatic.

The Dean took a volume from the pile beside him, and opened it at a marked page.

"Before concluding our report to the Bishop, Mr. Meynell, we wished to have your explanation of an important pa.s.sage in one of your recent sermons; and you have been kind enough to meet us with a view to giving us that explanation. Will you be so good as to look at the pa.s.sage?"

He handed the book to Meynell, who read it in silence. The few marked sentences concerned the Resurrection.

"These Resurrection stories have for our own days mainly a symbolic, perhaps one might call it a sacramental, importance. They are the 'outward and visible' sign of an inward mystery. As a simple matter of fact the continuous life of the spirit of Christ in mankind began with the death of Jesus of Nazareth. The Resurrection beliefs, so far as we can see, were the natural means by which that Life was secured."

"Are we right in supposing, Mr. Meynell," said the Dean, slowly, "that in those sentences you meant to convey that the Resurrection narratives of the New Testament were not to be taken as historical fact, but merely as mythical--or legendary?"

"The pa.s.sage means, I think, what it says, Mr. Dean."

"It is not, strictly speaking, logically incompatible," said the Professor, bending forward with a suave suggestiveness, "with acceptance of the statement in the Creed?"

Meynell threw him a slightly perplexed look, and did not reply immediately. The Dean sharply interposed.

"Do you in fact accept the statements of the Creed? In that case we might report to the Bishop that you felt you had been misinterpreted--and would withdraw the sermon complained of, in order to allay the scandal it has produced?"

Meynell looked up.

"No," he said quietly, "no; I shall not withdraw the sermon.

Besides"--the faintest gleam of a smile seemed to flit through the speaker's tired eyes--"that is only one of so many pa.s.sages."

There was a moment's silence. Then Canon Dornal said:

"Many things--many different views--as we all know, are permitted, must be permitted, nowadays. But the Resurrection--is vital!"

"The physical fact?" said Meynell gently. His look met that of Dornal; some natural sympathy seemed to establish itself at once between them.

"The _historical_ fact. If you could see your way to withdraw some of the statements in these volumes on this particular subject, much relief would be given to many--many wounded consciences."

The voice was almost pleading. The Dean moved abruptly in his chair.

Dornal's tone was undignified and absurd. Every page of the books teemed with heresy!

But Meynell was for the moment only aware of his questioner. He leaned across the table as though addressing him alone.

"To us too--the Resurrection is vital--the transposition of it, I mean--from the natural, or physical to the spiritual order."

Dornal did not of course attempt to argue. But as Meynell met the sensitive melancholy of his look the Rector remembered that during the preceding year Dornal had lost a little son, a delicate, gifted child, to whom he had been peculiarly attached. And Meynell's quick imagination realized in a moment the haunted imagination of the other--the dear ghost that lived there--and the hopes that grouped themselves about it.

A long wrestle followed between Meynell and the Professor. But Meynell could not be induced to soften or recant anything. He would often say indeed with an eager frown, when confronted with some statement of his own, "That was badly put! It should be so-and-so." And then would follow some vivid correction or expansion, which sometimes left the matter worse than before. The hopes of the Archdeacon, for one set of reasons, and of Dornal, for another, that some bridge of retreat might be provided by the interview, died away. The Dean had never hoped anything, and Mr. Brathay sat open-mouthed and aghast, while Meynell's voice and personality drove home ideas and audacities which on the printed page were but dim to him.

Why had the Anglican world been told for the last fifteen years that the whole critical onslaught--especially the German onslaught--was a beaten and discredited thing? It seemed to him terribly alive!

The library door opened again, and Meynell disappeared--ceremoniously escorted to the threshold by the Professor. When that gentleman was seated again, the Dean addressed the meeting.

"A most unsatisfactory interview! There is nothing for it, I fear, but to send in our report unaltered to the Bishop. I must therefore ask you to append your signatures."

All signed, and the meeting broke up.

"Do you know at all when the case is likely to come on?" said Dornal to the Dean.

"Hardly before November. The Letters of Request are ready. Then after the Arches will come the appeal to the Privy Council. The whole thing may take some time."

"You see the wild talk in some of the papers this morning," said the Professor, interposing, "about a national appeal to Parliament to 'bring the Articles of the Church of England into accordance with modern knowledge.' If there is any truth in it, there may be an Armageddon before us."

Dornal looked at him with distaste. The speaker's light tone, the note of relish in it, as of one delighting in the drama of life, revolted him.

On coming out of the Cathedral Library, Dornal walked across to the Cathedral and entered. He found his way to a little chapel of St. Oswald on the north side, where he was often wont to sit or kneel for ten minutes' quiet in a busy day. As he pa.s.sed the north transept he saw a figure sitting motionless in the shadow, and realized that it was Meynell.

The silence of the great Cathedral closed round him. He was conscious of nothing but his own personality, and, as it seemed, of Meynell's. They two seemed to be alone together in a world outside the living world.

Dornal could not define it, save that it was a world of reconciled enmities and contradictions. The sense of it alternated with a disagreeable recollection of the table in the Library and the men sitting round it, especially the cherubic face of the Professor; the thought also of the long, signed doc.u.ment which reported the "heresy" of Meynell.

He had been quite right to sign it. His soul went out in a pa.s.sionate adhesion to the beliefs on which his own life was built. Yet still the strange reconciling sense flowed in and round him, like the washing of a pure stream. He was certain that the Eternal Word had been made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, had died and risen, and been exalted; that the Church was now the mysterious channel of His risen life. He must, in mere obedience and loyalty, do battle for that certainty--guard it as the most precious thing in life for those that should come after.

Nevertheless he was conscious that there was in him none of the righteous anger, none of the moral condemnation, that his father or grandfather might have felt in the same case. As far as _feeling_ went, nothing divided him from Meynell. They two across the commission table--as accuser and accused--had recognized, each in the other, the man of faith.

The same forces played on both, mysteriously linking them, as the same sea links the headland which throws back its waves with the harbour which receives them.

Meynell too was conscious of Dornal as somewhere near him in the still, beautiful place, but only vaguely. He was storm-beaten by the labour and excitement of the preceding weeks, and these moments of rest in the Cathedral were sometimes all that enabled him to go through his day. He endeavoured often at such times to keep his mind merely vacant and pa.s.sive, avoiding especially the active religious thoughts which were more than brain and heart could continuously bear. "One cannot always think of it--one must not!" he would say to himself impatiently. And then he would offer himself eagerly to the mere sensuous impressions of the Cathedral--its beauty, its cool prismatic s.p.a.ces, its silences.

He did so to-day, though always conscious beyond the beauty, and the healing quiet, of the mysterious presence on which he "propped his soul."...

Conscious, too, of a dear human presence, closely interwoven now with his sense of things ineffable.

Latterly, as we have seen, he had not been without some scanty opportunities of meeting Mary Elsmere. In Miss Puttenham's drawing-room, whither the common anxiety about Hester had drawn him on many occasions, he had chanced once or twice on Miss Puttenham's new friend. In the village, Mrs. Flaxman was beginning to give him generous help; the parish nurse was started. And sometimes when she came to consult, her niece was with her, and Meynell, while talking to the aunt either of his people or of the progress of the heresy campaign, was always keenly aware of the girlish figure beside her--of the quick, shy smile--the voice and its tones.

She was with him in spirit--that he knew--pa.s.sionately knew. But the barriers between them were surely insurmountable. Her sympathy with him was like some warm, stifled thing--some chafing bird "beating up against the wind."

For a time, indeed, he had tried to put love from him, in the name of his high enterprise and its claims upon him. But as he sat tranced in the silence of the Cathedral that attempt finally gave way. His longing was hopeless, but it enriched his life. For it was fused with all that held him to his task; all that was divinest and sincerest in himself.

One of the great bells of the Cathedral struck the quarter. His moment of communion and of rest broke up. He rose abruptly and left the Cathedral for the crowded streets outside, thinking hard as he walked of quite other things.

The death of Mrs. Sabin in her son's cottage had been to Meynell like a stone flung into some deep shadowed pool--the ripples from it had been spreading through the secret places of life and thought ever since.

He had heard of the death on the morning after it occurred. John Broad, an inarticulate, secretive fellow, had come to the Rectory in quest of the Rector within a few hours of its occurrence. His mother had returned home, he said, unexpectedly, after many years of wanderings in the States; he had not had very much conversation with her, as she had seemed ill and tired and "terrible queer" when she arrived. He and his boys had given up their room to her for the night, and she had been very late in coming downstairs the following morning. He had had to go to his work, and when he came back in the evening he found her in great pain and unable to talk to him. She would not allow him to call any doctor, and had locked herself in her room. In the morning he had forced the door and had found her dead. He did not know that she had seen anybody but himself and his boys since her arrival.

But she had seen some one else. As the Rector walked along the street he had in his pocket a cutting from the Markborough _Post_, containing the report of the inquest, from which it appeared--the Rector of course was well aware of it--that Mr. Henry Barron of the White House, going to the cottage to complain of the conduct of the children in the plantation, had found her there, and had talked to her for some time. "I thought her excited--and overtired--no doubt by the journey," he had said to the Coroner. "I tried to persuade her to let me send in a woman to look after her, but she refused."

In Barron's evidence at the inquest, to which Meynell had given close attention, there had been no hint whatever as to the nature of his conversation with Mrs. Sabin. Nor had there been any need to inquire. The medical evidence was quite clear as to the cause of death--advanced brain disease, fatally aggravated by the journey.