The Case of Richard Meynell Part 39

Henry Barron held up a page of the _Times_ and pointed to its first column.

"I sent it in some time ago."

"And pray what does your parish think of it?"

"They won't support me."

"Thank G.o.d!"

Barron rose majestically to his feet, and from the rug surveyed his thin, fair-haired son. Stephen had just ridden over from his own tiny vicarage, twelve miles away, to settle some business connected with a family legacy with his father. Since the outbreak of the Reform Movement there had been frequent disputes between the father and son, if aggressive attack on the one side and silent endurance on the other make a dispute. Barron scorned his eldest son, as a faddist and a dreamer; while Stephen could never remember the time when his father had not seemed to him the living embodiment of prejudice, obstinacy, and caprice. He had always reckoned it indeed the crowning proof of Meynell's unworldly optimism that, at the moment of his father's accession to the White House estate, there should have been a pa.s.sing friendship between him and the Rector. Yet whenever thoughts of this kind presented themselves explicitly to Stephen he tried to suppress them. His life, often, was a constant struggle between a genuine and irrepressible dislike of his father and a sore sense that no Christian priest could permit himself such a feeling.

He made no reply to his father's interjection. But Barron knew very well that his son's self-control was no indication of lack of will; quite the contrary; and the father was conscious of a growing exasperation as he watched the patient compression of the young mouth. He wanted somehow to convict and crush Stephen; and he believed that he held the means thereto in his hand. He had not been sure before Stephen arrived whether he should reveal the situation or not. But the temptation was too great.

That the son's mind and soul should finally have escaped his father, "like a bird out of the snare of the fowler," was the unforgivable offence. What a gentle, malleable fellow he had seemed in his school and college days!--how amenable to the father's spiritual tyranny! It was Barron's constant excuse to himself for his own rancorous feeling--that Meynell had robbed him of his son.

"You probably think it strange"--he resumed harshly--"that I should rejoice in what of course is your misfortune--that your people reject you; but there are higher interests than those of personal affection concerned in this business. We who are defending her must think first of the Church!"

"Naturally," said Stephen.

His father looked at him in silence for a moment, at the mild pliant figure, the downcast eyes.

"There is, however, one thing for which I have cause--we all have cause--to be grateful to Meynell," he said, with emphasis.

Stephen looked up.

"I understand he refused to sanction your engagement to Hester Fox-Wilton."

The young man flushed.

"It would be better, I think, father, if we are to talk over these matters quietly--which I understood is the reason you asked me to come here to-day--that you should avoid a tone toward myself and my affairs which can only make frank conversation difficult or impossible between us."

"I have no desire to be offensive," said Barron, checking himself with difficulty, "and I have only your good in view, though you may not believe it. My reason for approving Meynell in the matter is that he was aware--and you were not aware"--he fell into the slow phrasing he always affected on important occasions--"of facts bearing vitally on your proposal; and that in the light of them he acted as any honest man was bound to act."

"What do you mean!" cried Stephen, springing to his feet.

"I mean"--the answer was increasingly deliberate--"that Hester Fox-Wilton--it is very painful to have to go into these things, but it is necessary, I regret to say--is not a Fox-Wilton at all--and has no right whatever to her name!"

Stephen walked up to the speaker.

"Take care, father! This is a question of a _girl_--an unprotected girl!

What right have you to say such an abominable thing!"

He stood panting and white, in front of his father.

"The right of truth!" said Barron. "It happens to be true."

"Your grounds?"

"The confession of the woman who nursed her mother--who was _not_ Lady Fox-Wilton."

Barron had now a.s.sumed the habitual att.i.tude--thumbs in his pockets, legs slightly apart--that Stephen had a.s.sociated from his childhood with the long bullying, secular and religious, that Barron's family owed to Barron's temperament.

In the pause, Stephen's quick breathing could be heard.

"Who was she?"

The son's tone had caught the father's sharpness.

"Well, my dear Stephen, I am not sure that I shall tell you while you look at me in that fashion! Believe me--it is not my fault, but my misfortune, that I happen to be acquainted with this very disagreeable secret. And I have one thing to say--you must give me your promise that you will regard any communication from me as entirely confidential, before I say another word."

Stephen walked away to the window and came back.

"Very well. I promise."

"Sit down. It is a long story."

The son obeyed mechanically, his frowning eyes fixed upon his father.

Barron at once plunged into an account of his interview with Judith Sabin, omitting only those portions of it which connected the story with Meynell. It was evident, presently, that Stephen--to the dawning triumph of his father--listened with an increasingly troubled mind. And indeed, at the first whisper of the story, there had flashed through the young man's memory the vision of Meynell arguing and expostulating on that July afternoon, when he, Stephen, had spoken so confidingly, so unsuspectingly of his love for Hester. He recalled his own amazement, his sense of shock and strangeness. What Meynell said on that occasion seemed to have so little relation to what Meynell habitually was.

Meynell, for whom love, in its spiritual aspect, was the salt and significance of life, the foundation of all wisdom--Meynell on that occasion had seemed to make comparatively nothing of love!--to deny its simplest rights--to put it despotically out of count. Stephen, as he had long recognized, had been overborne and silenced by Meynell's personality rather than by Meynell's arguments--by the disabling force mainly of his own devotion to the man who bade him wait and renounce. But in his heart he had never quite forgiven, or understood; and for all the subsequent trouble about Hester, all his own jealousy and pain, he had not been able to prevent himself from blaming Meynell. And now--now!--if this story were true--he began to understand. Poor child--poor mother! With the marriage of the child, must come--he felt the logic of it--the confession of the mother. A woman like Alice Puttenham, a man like Meynell, were not likely to give Hester to her lover without telling that lover what he had a right to know. Small blame to them if they were not prepared to bring about that crisis prematurely, while Hester was still so young! It must be faced--but not, _not_ till it must!

Yes, he understood. A rush of warm and pitiful love filled his heart; while his intelligence dismally accepted and endorsed the story his father was telling with that heavy tragic touch which the son instinctively hated as insincere and theatrical.

"Now then, perhaps,"--Barron wound up--"you will realize why it is I feel Meynell has acted considerately, and as any true friend of yours was bound to act. He knew--and you were ignorant. Such a marriage could not have been for your happiness, and he rightly interposed."

"What difference does it make to Hester herself," cried Stephen hotly--"supposing the thing is true? I admit--it may be true," and as he spoke a host of small confirmations came thronging into his unwilling mind. "But in any case--"

He walked up to his father again.

"What have you done about it, father?" he said, sharply. "I suppose you went to Meynell at once."

Barron smiled, with a lift of the eyebrows. He knocked off the end of his cigarette, and paused.

"Of course you have seen Meynell?" Stephen repeated.

"No, I haven't."

"I should have thought that was your first duty."

"It was not easy to decide what my duty was," said Barron, with the same emphasis, "not at all easy."

"What do you mean, father? There seems to be something more behind. If there is, considering my feeling for Hester, it seems to me that having told me so much you are bound to tell me _all_ you know. Remember--this story concerns the girl I love!"

Pa.s.sion and pain spoke in the young man's voice. His father looked at him with an involuntary sympathy.

"I know. I am very sorry for you. But it concerns other people also."

"What is known of the father?" said Stephen abruptly.

"Ah, that is the point!" said Barron, making an abstracted face.