The Case of Richard Meynell Part 55

The little Bishop frowned. As he sat there in the dignity of his great library, so scrupulously refined and correct in every detail of dress, yet without a touch of foppery, the gleam of the cross on his breast answering the silver of the hair and the frank purity of the eyes, it was evident that he felt a pa.s.sionate impatience--half moral, half esthetic--toward these new elements of the Meynell case. It was the fastidious impatience of a man for whom personal gossip and scandal ranked among the forbidden indulgences of life. "Things, not persons!"

had been the time-honoured rule for conversation at the Palace table--persons, that is, of the present day. In those happy persons who had already pa.s.sed into biography and history, in their peccadilloes no less than their virtues, the Bishop's interest was boundless. The distinction tended to make him a little super- or infra-human; but it enhanced the fragrance and delicacy of his personality.

Dornal was no less free from any stain of mean or scandalous gossip than the Bishop, but his knowledge of the human heart was far deeper, his sympathy far more intimate. It was not only that he scorned the slander, but, hour by hour, he seemed to walk in the same cloud with Meynell.

After some further discussion, the Bishop took up Barron's letter again.

"I see there is likely to be a most painful scene at the Church Council meeting--which of course will be also one of their campaign meetings--the day after to-morrow. Barron declares that he means to challenge Meynell publicly to vindicate his character. Can I do anything?"

Dornal did not see anything could be done. The parish was already in open rebellion.

"It is a miserable, miserable business!" said the Bishop unhappily. "How can I get a report of the meeting--from some one else than Barron?"

"Mr. Flaxman is sure to be there?"

"Ah!--get him to write to me?"

"And you, my lord--will send for Meynell?"

"I think"--said the Bishop, with returning soreness--"that as he has neither written to me, nor consulted me, I will wait a little. We must watch--we must watch. Meanwhile, my dear fellow!"--he laid his hand on Dornal's shoulder--"let us think how to stop the talk! It will spoil everything. Those who are fighting with us must understand there are weapons we cannot stoop to use!"

As Dornal left the Palace, on his way past the Cathedral, he met young Fenton, the High Churchman who some months earlier had refused to recognize Meynell after the first Modernist meeting in Markborough.

Fenton was walking slowly and reading the local newspaper--the same which contained the anonymous letter. His thin, finely modelled face, which in a few years would resemble the Houdon statue of St. Bruno, expressed an eager excitement that was not unlike jubilation. Dornal was practically certain that he was reading the paragraph that concerned Meynell, and certain also that it gave him pleasure. He hurriedly pa.s.sed over to the other side of the street, that Fenton might not accost him.

Afterward, he spent the evening, partly in writing urgently in Meynell's defence to certain of his own personal friends in the diocese, and partly in composing an anti-Modernist address, full of a sincere and earnest eloquence, to be delivered the following week at a meeting of the Church party in Cambridge.

Meanwhile Cyril Fenton had also spent the evening in writing. He kept an elaborate journal of his own spiritual state; or rather he had begun to keep it about six months before this date, at the moment when the emergence of the Modernist Movement had detached him from his nascent friendship with Meynell, and had thrown him back, terrified, on a more resolute opposition than ever to the novelties and presumptions of free inquiry. The danger of reading anything, unawares, that might cause him even a moment's uneasiness had led to his gradually cutting himself off entirely from modern newspapers and modern books, in which, indeed, he had never taken any very compelling interest. His table was covered by various English and French editions of the Fathers--of St. Cyprian in particular, for whom he had a cult. On the bare walls of his study were various pictures of saints, a statuette of the Virgin, and another of St. Joseph, both of them feebly elegant in the Munich manner. Through his own fresh youthfulness, once so winning and wholesome, something pinched and cloistered had begun to thrust itself. His natural sweetness of temper was rapidly becoming sinful in his own eyes, his natural love of life also, and its harmless, even its ideal, pleasures.

It was a bitter winter day, and he had not allowed himself a greatcoat.

In consequence he felt depressed and chilled; yet he could not make up his mind to go to bed earlier than usual, lest he should be thereby pampering the flesh. He was thoroughly dissatisfied with his own spiritual condition during the day, and had just made ample confession thereof in the pages of his diary. A few entries from that doc.u.ment will show the tone of a mind morbid for lack of exercise:

"D. came to see me this morning. We discussed war a good deal. In general, of course, I am opposed to war, but when I think of this ghastly plague of heresy which is sweeping away so many souls at the present moment, I feel sometimes that the only war into which I could enter with spirit would be a civil war.... In a great deal of my talk with D. I posed abominably. I talked of shooting and yachting as though I knew all about them. I can't be content that people should think me 'out' of anything, or a dull fool. It was the same with my talk to S. about church music. I talked most arrogantly; and in reality I know hardly anything about it.

"As to my vow of simplicity in food, I must keep my attention more on the alert. Yet to-day I have not done so badly; some cold ends of herring at breakfast, and a morsel of mackerel at lunch are the only things I have to reproach myself with; the only lapses from the strict rule of simplicity. But the quant.i.ty was deplorable--no moderation--not even a real attempt at it. Whenever I am disgusted with myself for having eaten too much at dinner, I constantly fail to draw the proper inference--that I should eat less at tea....

"I feel that this scandal about poor Meynell is probably providential. It must and will weaken the Modernist party enormously. To thank G.o.d for such a thing sounds horrible, but after all, have we any right to be more squeamish than Holy Writ? 'Let G.o.d arise and let His enemies be scattered.' The warnings and menaces of what are called the Imprecatory Psalms show us plainly that His enemies must be ours."

He closed his book, and came to shiver over the very inadequate fire which was all he allowed himself. Every shilling that he could put aside was being saved in order to provide his church with a new set of altar furniture. The congregation of the church was indeed fast ebbing away, and his heart was full of bitterness on the subject. But how could a true priest abate any fraction of either his Church principles, or his sound doctrine, to appease persons who were not and could not be judges of what was necessary to their own spiritual health?

As he warmed his thin hands, his bodily discomfort increased his religious despondency. Then, of a sudden, his eyes fell upon the portrait of a child standing on the mantelpiece--his sister's child, aged four.

The cloud on the still boyish brow lightened at once.

"Tommy's birthday to-morrow," he said to himself. "Jolly little chap!

Must write to him. Here goes!"

And reaching out his hand for his writing-case he wrote eagerly, a letter all fun and baby-talk, and fantastic drawings, in the course of which Tommy grew up, developed moustaches, and became a British Grenadier.

When he had finished it and put it up, he lay back laughing to himself, a different being.

But the gleam was only momentary. A recurring sense of chill and physical oppression dispersed it. Presently he rose heavily, glanced at his open diary, reread the last page with a sigh, and closed it. Then, as it was nearly midnight, he retreated upstairs to his bare and icy bedroom, where half-an-hour's attempt to meditate completed the numbness of body and mind, in which state ultimately he went to bed, though not to sleep.

The meeting of the Church Council of Upcote was held in the Church House of the village a few days after the Bishop's conversation with Canon Dornal. It was an evening long remembered by those who shared in it.

The figure of Meynell instinct with a kind of fierce patience; the face rugged as ever, but paler and tenderer in repose, as of one who, mystically sustained, had been pa.s.sing through deep waters; his speech, sternly repressed, and yet for the understanding ear, enriched by new tones and shades of feeling--on those who believed in him the effect of these slight but significant changes in the man they loved was electrical.

And five-sixths of those present believed in him, loved him, and were hotly indignant at the scandals which had arisen. They were, some of them, the elite of the mining population, men whom he had known and taught from childhood; there were many officials from the surrounding collieries; there was a miners' agent, who was also one of the well-known local preachers of the district; there were half a dozen women--the schoolmistress, the wife of the manager of the cooperative store, and three or four wives of colliers--women to whom other women in childbirth, or the girl who had gone astray, or the motherless child, might appeal without rebuff, who were in fact the Rector's agents in any humanizing effort.

All these persons had come to the meeting eagerly expecting to hear from the Rector's own lips the steps he proposed to take for the putting down of the slanders circulating in the diocese, and the punishment of their authors. In the rear of the Council--who had been themselves elected by the whole parish--there were two or three rows of seats occupied by other inhabitants of the village, who made an audience. In the front row sat the strange spinster, Miss Nairn, a thin, sharp nosed woman of fifty, in rusty black clothes, holding her head high; not far from her the dubious publican who had been Maurice Barron's companion on a certain walk some days before. There too were Hugh and Rose Flaxman. And just as the proceedings were about to begin, Henry Barron opened the heavy door, hat in hand, came in with a firm step, and took a seat at the back, while a thrill of excitement went through the room.

It was an ancient room, near the church, and built like it, of red sandstone. It had been once the tiny grammar school of the village.

Meynell had restored and adapted it, keeping still its old features--the low ceiling heavily beamed with oak, and the row of desks inscribed with the scholars' names of three centuries. Against the background of its white walls he stood thrown out in strong relief by the oil lamp on the table in front of him, his eyes travelling over the rows of familiar faces.

He spoke first of the new Liturgy of which copies had been placed on the seats. He reminded them they were all--or nearly all--comrades with him in the great Modernist venture; that they had given him the help of their approval and support at every step, and were now rebels with him against the authorities of the day. He pointed to his approaching trial, and the probability--nay the certainty--of his deprivation. He asked them to be steadfast with him, and he dwelt on the amazing spread of the Movement, the immense responsibility resting upon its first leaders and disciples, and the need for gentleness and charity. The room was hushed in silence.

Next, he proceeded to put the adoption of the new Liturgy to the vote.

Suddenly Barron rose from his seat at the back. Meynell paused. The audience looked in suppressed excitement from one to the other.

"I regret," said the Rector, courteously, "that we cannot hear Mr. Barron at this moment. He is not a member of the Church Council. When the proceedings of the Council are over, this will become an open meeting, and Mr. Barron will then of course say what he wishes to say."

Barron hesitated a moment; then sat down.

The revised Liturgy was adopted by twenty-eight votes to two. One of the two dissentients was Dawes, the colliery manager, a sincere and consistent evangelical of the Simeon School, who made a short speech in support of his vote, dwelling in a voice which shook on the troubles coming on the parish.

"We may get another Rector," he said as he sat down. "We shall never get another Richard Meynell." A deep murmur of acquiescence ran through the room.

Meynell rose again from his seat.

"Our business is over. We now become an open meeting. Mr. Barron, I believe, wishes to speak."

The room was, at this point, densely crowded and every face turned toward the tall and portly form rising from the back. In the flickering lamplight it could be seen that the face usually so ruddy and full was blanched by determination and pa.s.sion.

"My friends and neighbours!" said Barron, "it is with sorrow and grief that I rise to say the few words that I intend to say. On the audacity and illegality of what you have just done I shall say nothing. Argument, I know, would be useless. But _this_ I have come to say: You have just been led--misled--into an act of heresy and rebellion by the man who should be your pastor in the Faith, who is responsible to G.o.d for your souls. _Why_ have you been misled?--_why_ do you follow him?" He flung out his hand toward Meynell.

"Because you admire and respect him--because you believe him a good man--a man of honest and pure life. And I am here to tell you, or rather to remind you, for indeed you all know it--that your Rector lies at this moment under a painful and disgraceful charge; that this charge has been circulated--in a discreditable way--a way for which I have no defence and of which I know nothing--throughout this diocese, and indeed throughout England; that your fair fame, as well as his are concerned; and, nevertheless, he refuses to take the only steps which can clear his character, and repay you for the devotion you have shown him! I call upon you, sir!"--the speaker bent forward, pointing impressively to the chairman of the meeting and emphasizing every word--"to take those steps at once! They are open to you at any moment. Take them against myself!

I have given, I will give, you every opportunity. But till that is done do not continue, in the face of the congregation you have deceived and led astray, to a.s.sume the tone of hypocritical authority in which you have just spoken! You have no moral right to any authority among us; you never had any such right; and in Christian eyes your infidel teaching has led to its natural results. At any rate, I trust that now, at last, even these your friends and dupes will see the absolute necessity, before many weeks are over, of either _forcing_ you to resign your living, or _forcing_ you to take the only means open to honest men of protecting their character!"

He resumed his seat. The audience sat petrified a moment. Then Hugh Flaxman sprang to his feet, and two or three others, the local preacher among them. But Meynell had also risen.

"Please, Mr. Flaxman--my friends--!"

He waved a quiet hand toward those who had risen, and they unwillingly gave way. Then the Rector looked round the room for a few silent instants. He was very white, but when he spoke it was with complete composure.

"I expected something of this kind to happen, and whether it had happened or no I should have spoken to you on this matter before we separated. I know--you all know--to what Mr. Barron refers--that he is speaking of the anonymous letters concerning myself and others which have been circulated in this neighbourhood. He calls upon me, I understand, to take legal action with regard both to them and to the reports which he has himself circulated, by word of mouth, and probably by letter. Now I want you plainly to understand"--he bent forward, his hands on the table before him, each word clear and resonant--"that I shall take no such action!

My reasons I shall not give you. I stand upon my life among you and my character among you all these years. This only I will say to you, my friends and my parishioners: The abominable story told in these letters--the story which Mr. Barron believes, or tries to make himself believe--is untrue. But I will say no more than that--to you, or any one else. And if you are to make legal action on my part a test of whether you will continue to follow me religiously--to accept me as your leader, or no--then my friends, we must part! You must go your way, and I must go mine. There will be still work for me to do; and G.o.d knows our hearts--yours and mine."