The Case of Richard Meynell Part 54

Meanwhile, amid this sensitive intermingling of the thoughts and feelings of women, there arose the sudden tumult and scandal of the new elements which had thrust themselves into what was already known to the religious world throughout England as "the Meynell case." During November and December that case came to include two wholly different things: the ecclesiastical suit in the Court of Arches, which, owing to a series of delays and to the illness of the Dean of the Court, was not to be heard in all probability before February, and the personal charges brought against the inc.u.mbent of Upcote Minor.

These fresh charges were formally launched by Henry Barron, the chief promoter also, as we know, of the ecclesiastical suit, in a letter written by him to Bishop Craye, on the very night when Alice Puttenham revealed her secret to Catharine Elsmere. But before we trace the effect of the letter, let us look for a moment at the general position of the Movement when this second phase of Meynell's connection with it began.

At that time the pending suits against the Modernist leaders--for there were now five inst.i.tuted by different bishops, as test cases, in different parts of England--were already the subject of the keenest expectation and debate not only in church circles, but amid sections of the nation which generally trouble themselves very little about clerical or religious disputes. New births of time were felt to be involved in the legal struggle; pa.s.sionate hopes and equally pa.s.sionate fears hung upon it. There were old men in quiet country parsonages who, when they read the _Modernist_ and followed the accounts of the Movement, were inclined to say to themselves with secret joy and humility that other men were entering into their labours, and the fields were at last whitening to harvest; while others, like Newman of old, had "fierce thoughts toward the Liberals," talked and spoke of Meynell and the whole band of Modernist clergy as traitors with whom no parley could be kept, and were ready to break up the Church at twenty-four hours' notice rather than sit down at the same table of the Lord with heretics and Socinians.

Between these two groups of men, each equally confident and clear, though by no means equally talkative, there was a middle region that contained many anxious minds and some of the wisest heads in England. If, at the time of Norham's visit to Maudeley, Bishop Craye of Markborough, and many other bishops with him, were still certain that the Movement would be promptly and easily put down, so far at least as its organic effect on the Church of England was concerned, yet, as November and December wore on, anxieties deepened, and confidence began to waver. The pa.s.sion of the Movement was beginning to run through England, as it seemed to many, like the flame of an explosion through a dusty mine. What amazed and terrified the bishops was the revelation of pent-up energies, rebellions, ideals, not only among their own flocks, but in quarters, and among men and women, hitherto ruled out of religious affairs by general consent. They pondered the crowds which had begun to throng the Modernist churches, the extraordinary growth of the Modernist press, and the figures reported day by day as to the pet.i.tion to be presented to Parliament in February.

There was no orthodox person in authority who was not still determined on an unconditional victory; but it was admitted that the skies were darkening.

The effect of the Movement on the Dissenters--on that half of religious England which stands outside the National Church, where "grace" takes the place of authority, and bishops are held to be superfluities incompatible with the pure milk of the Word--was in many respects remarkable. The majority of the Wesleyan Methodists had thrown themselves strongly on to the side of the orthodox party in the Church; but among the Congregationalists and Presbyterians there was visible a great ferment of opinion and a great cleavage of sympathy; while, among the Primitive Methodists, a body founded on the straitest tenets of Bible worship, yet interwoven, none the less, with the working cla.s.s life of England and Wales, and bringing day by day the majesty and power of religion to bear upon the acts and consciences of plain, poor, struggling men, there was visible a strong and definite current of acquiescence in Modernist ideas, which was inexplicable, till one came to know that among Meynell's friends at Upcote there were two or three Primitive local preachers who had caught fire from him, were now active members of his Church Council, and ardent though persecuted missionaries to their own body.

Meanwhile the Unitarians--small and gallant band!--were like persons standing on tiptoe before an opening glory. In their isolated and often mistaken struggle they had felt themselves for generations stricken with chill and barrenness; their blood now began to feel the glow of new kinships, the pa.s.sion of large horizons. So, along the banks of some slender and much hindered stream, there come blown from the nearing sea prophetic scents and murmurs, and one may dream that the pent water knows at last the whence and whither of its life.

But the strangest spectacle of all perhaps was presented by the orthodox camp. For, in proportion as the Modernist attack developed, was the revival of faith among those hostile to it, or unready for it. For the first time in their lives, religion became interesting--thrilling even--to thousands of persons for whom it had long lost all real savour.

Fierce question and answer, the hot cut and thrust of argument, the pa.s.sion of honest fight on equal terms--without these things, surely, there has been no religious epoch, of any importance, in man's history.

English orthodoxy was at last vitally attacked; and it began to show a new life, and express itself in a new language. These were times when men on all sides felt that stretching and straining of faculty which ushers in the days of spiritual or poetic creation; times when the most confident Modernist of them all knew well that he, no more than any one else, could make any guess worth having as to the ultimate future.

Of all this rapid and amazing development the personality and the writings of Richard Meynell had in few months become the chief popular symbol. There were some who thought that he was likely to take much the same place in the Modernist Movement of the twentieth century as Newman had taken in the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth; and men were beginning to look for the weekly article in the _Modernist_ with the same emotion of a pa.s.sionate hero-worship on the one hand, and of angry repulsion on the other, with which the Oxford of the thirties had been wont to look for each succeeding "Tract," or for Newman's weekly sermon at St. Mary's. To Newman's high subtleties of brain, to Newman's magic of style, Richard Meynell could not pretend. But he had two advantages over the great leader of the past: he was the disciple of a new learning which was inaccessible to Newman; and he was on fire with social compa.s.sions and enthusiasms to which Newman, the great Newman, was always pathetically a stranger. In these two respects Meynell was the representative of his own generation; while the influences flowing from his personal character and life were such that thousands who had never seen him loved and trusted him wholly. Men who had again and again watched great causes break down for want of the incommunicable something which humanity exacts from its leaders felt with a quiet and confident gladness that in Meynell they had got the man they wanted, the efficacious, indispensable man.

And now--suddenly--incredible things began to be said. It was actually maintained that the leader round whom such feelings had gathered had been, since his ordination, the betrayer of a young and innocent girl, belonging to a well-known family; that although it had been in his power for twenty years to marry the lady he had wronged, he had never attempted to do so, but had rather, during all that time, actively connived at the fraud by which his illegitimate child had pa.s.sed as the daughter of Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton; while over the whole period he had kept up relations--and who knew of what character?--with the child's mother, an inhabitant of the very village where he himself was Rector.

Presently--it was added that Mr. Henry Barron, of Upcote Minor, one of the prosecutors in the ecclesiastical suit, had obtained unexpected and startling confirmation of these extraordinary facts from the confession of a woman who had been present at the birth of the child and had identified the Rector of Upcote as the father. Then, very soon, paragraphs of a veiled sort began to appear in some of the less responsible newspapers. The circulation of the anonymous letters began to be known; and the reader of a Modernist essay at an Oxford meeting caused universal consternation by telling an indiscreet friend, who presently spread it abroad, that Barron had already written to the Bishop of Markborough, placing in his hands a ma.s.s of supporting evidence relating to "this most lamentable business."

At first Meynell's friends throughout the country regarded these rumours as a mere device of the evil one. Similar things they said, and with truth, are constantly charged against heretics who cannot be put down.

Slander is the first weapon of religious hatred. Meynell, they triumphantly answered, will put the anonymous letters in the hands of the police, and proceed against Henry Barron. And they who have taken up such a weapon shall but perish by it themselves the sooner.

But the weeks pa.s.sed on. Not only were no proceedings taken, or, apparently, in prospect, by Meynell against his accusers; not only did the anonymous letters reappear from time to time, untracked and unpunished, but reports of a meeting held at Upcote itself began to spread--a meeting where Meynell had been definitely and publicly challenged by Barron to take action for the vindication of his character, and had definitely and publicly refused.

The world of a narrow and embittered orthodoxy began to breathe again; and there was black depression in the Modernist camp.

Let us, however, go back a little.

Barron's letter to the Bishop was the first shot in the direct and responsible attack. It consisted of six or seven closely written sheets, and agreed in substance with four or five others from the same hand, addressed at the same moment to the chief heads of the Orthodox party.

The Bishop received it at breakfast, just after he had concluded a hot political argument with his little granddaughter Barbara.

"All Tories are wicked," said Barbara, who had a Radical father, "except grandpapa, and he, mummy says, is weally a Riberal."

With which she had leaped into the arms of her nurse, and was carried off gurgling, while the Bishop threatened her from afar.

Then, with a sigh of impatience, as he recognized the signature on the envelope, he resigned himself to Barron's letter. When he had done it, sitting by the table in his library, he threw it from him with indignation, called for his coat, and hurried across his garden to the Cathedral for matins. After service, as with a troubled countenance he was emerging from the transept door, he saw Dornal in the Close and beckoned to him.

"Come into the library for ten minutes. I very much want to speak to you."

The Bishop led the way, and as soon as the door was shut he turned eagerly on his companion:

"Do you know anything of these abominable stories that are being spread about Richard Meynell?"

Dornal looked at him sadly.

"They are all over Markborough--and there is actually a copy of one of the anonymous letters--with dashes for the names--in the _Post_ to-day?"

"I never hear these things!" said the Bishop, with an impatience which was meant, half for a scandal-mongering world, and half for himself. "But Barron has written me a perfectly incredible letter to-day. He seems to be the head and front of the whole business. I don't like Barron, and I don't like his letters!"

And throwing one slender leg over the other, while the tips of his long fingers met in a characteristic gesture, the little Bishop stared into the fire before him with an expression of mingled trouble and disgust.

Dornal, clearly, was no less unhappy. Drawing his chair close to the Bishop's he described the manner in which the story had reached himself.

When he came to the curious facts concerning the diffusion and variety of the anonymous letters, the Bishop interrupted him:

"And Barron tells me he knows nothing of these letters!"

"So I hear also."

"But, my dear Dornal, if he doesn't, it makes the thing inexplicable!

Here we have a woman who comes home dying, and sees one person only--Henry Barron--to whom she tells her story."

The Bishop went through the points of Barron's narrative, and concluded:

"Then, on the top of this, after her death--her son denying all knowledge of his mother's history--comes this crop of extraordinary letters, showing, you tell me, an intimate acquaintance with the neighbourhood and the parties concerned. And yet Barron--the only person Mrs. Sabin saw--knows nothing of them! They are a mystery to him. But, my dear Dornal, how _can_ they be?" The Bishop faced round with energy on his companion. "He must at least have talked incautiously before some one!"

Dornal agreed, but could put forward no suggestion of his own. He sat drooping by the Bishop's fire, his aspect expressing the deep distress he did not shape in words. That very distress, however, was what made his company so congenial to the much perturbed Bishop, who felt, moreover, a warmer affection for Dornal than for any other member of his Chapter.

The Bishop resumed:

"Meanwhile, not a word from Meynell himself! That I confess wounds me."

He sighed. "However, I suppose he regards our old confidential relations as broken off. To me--until the law has spoken--he is always one of my 'clergy'"--the Bishop's voice showed emotion--"and he would get my fatherly help just as freely as ever, if he chose to ask for it. But I don't know whether to send for him. I don't think I can send for him. The fact is--one feels the whole thing an outrage!"

Dornal looked up.

"That's the word!" he said gratefully. Then he added--hesitating--"I ought perhaps to tell you that I have written to Meynell--I wrote when the first report of the thing reached me. And I am sure that he can have no possible objection to my showing you his reply!" He put his hand into his pocket.

"By all means, my dear Dornal!" cried the Bishop with a brightening countenance. "We are both his friends, in spite of all that has happened and may happen. By all means, show me the letter."

Dornal handed it over. It ran as follows:

"MY DEAR DORNAL: It was like you to write to me, and with such kindness and delicacy. But even to you I can only say what I say to other questioners of a very different sort. The story to which you refer is untrue. But owing to peculiar circ.u.mstances it is impossible for me to defend myself in the ordinary way, and my lips are sealed with regard to it. I stand upon my character as known to my neighbours and the diocese for nearly twenty years. If that is not enough, I cannot help it.

"Thank you always for the goodness and gentleness of your letter. I wish with all my heart I could give you more satisfaction."

The two men looked at each other, the same conjectures pa.s.sing through both minds.

"I hear the Fox-Wiltons and Miss Puttenham have all gone abroad," said the Bishop thoughtfully. "Poor things! I begin to see a glimmer. It seems to me that Meynell has been the repository of some story he feels he cannot honourably divulge. And then you tell me the letters show the handiwork of some one intimately acquainted with the local circ.u.mstances, who seems to have watched Meynell's daily life. It is of course possible that he may have been imprudent with regard to this poor lady. Let us a.s.sume that he knew her story and advised her. He may not have been sufficiently careful. Further, there is that striking and unfortunate likeness of which Barron of course makes the most. I noticed it myself, on an evening when I happened, at Maudeley, to see that handsome girl and Meynell in the same room. It is difficult to say in what it consists, but it must occur to many people who see them together."

There was silence a moment. Then Dornal said:

"How will it all affect the trial?"

"In the Court of Arches? Technically of course--not at all. But it will make all the difference to the atmosphere in which it is conducted. One can imagine how certain persons are already gloating over it--what use they will make of it--how they will magnify and embroider everything. And such an odious story! It is the degradation of a great issue!"