The Case of Richard Meynell Part 73

She rose, and Meynell led her from the room. Outside was a nurse to whom he resigned her.

"My dear, dear friend!" Trembling, her eyes met the deep emotion in his.

"That was right--that will bring you help. Aye! you have her now--all, all your own."

On the day of Hester's burying Long Whindale lay glittering white under a fitful and frosty sunshine. The rocks and screes with their steep beds of withered heather made dark scrawls and scratches on the white; the smoke from the farmhouses rose bluish against the snowy wall of fell; and the river, amid the silence of the m.u.f.fled roads and paths, seemed the only audible thing in the valley.

In the tiny churchyard the new-made grave had been filled in with frozen earth, and on the sods lay flowers piled there by Rose Flaxman's kind and busy hands. She and Hugh had arrived from the south that morning.

Another visitor had come from the south, also to lay flowers on that wintry grave. Stephen Barron's dumb pain was bitter to see. The silence of spiritual and physical exhaustion in which Meynell had been wrapped since the morning of the inquest was first penetrated and broken up by the sight of Stephen's anguish. And in the attempt to comfort the younger, the elder man laid hold on some returning power for himself.

But he had been hardly hit; and the depth of the wound showed itself strangely--in a kind of fear of love itself, a fear of Mary! Meynell's att.i.tude toward her during these days was almost one of shrinking. The atmosphere between them was electrical; charged with things unspoken, and a conflict that must be faced.

The day after Hester's funeral the newspapers were full of the sentence delivered on the preceding day, in the Arches Court, on Meynell and his co-defendants. A telegram from Darwen the evening before had conveyed the news to Meynell himself.

The sentence of deprivation _ab officio et beneficio_ in the Church of England, on the ground of heretical opinion and unauthorized services, had been expressed by the Dean of Arches in a tone and phraseology of considerable vehemence. According to him the proceedings of the Modernists were "as contrary to morality as to law," and he marvelled how "honest men" could consent to occupy the position of Meynell and his friends.

Notice of appeal to the Privy Council was at once given by the Modernist counsel, and a flame of discussion arose throughout England.

Meanwhile, on the morning following the publication of the judgment, Meynell finished a letter, and took it into the dining-room, where Rose and Mary were sitting. Rose, reading his face, disappeared, and he put the letter into Mary's hands.

It was addressed to the Bishop of Dunchester. The great gathering in Dunchester Cathedral, after several postponements to match the delays in the Court of Arches, was to take place within a fortnight from this date, and Meynell had been everywhere announced as the preacher of the sermon, which was to be the battle-cry of the Movement, in the second period of its history; the period of open revolt, of hot and ardent conflict.

The letter which Mary was invited to read was short. It simply asked that the writer should be relieved from a task he felt he could not adequately carry out. He desired to lay it down, not for his own sake, but for the sake of the cause. "I am not the man, and this is not my job. This conviction has been borne in upon me during the last few weeks with an amazing clearness. I will only say that it seems to represent a command--a prohibition--laid upon me, which I cannot ignore. There are of course tragic happenings and circ.u.mstances connected with it, my dear lord, on which I will not dwell. The effect of them at present on my mind is that I wish to retire from a public and prominent part in our great Movement; at any rate for a time. I shall carry through the Privy Council appeal; but except for that intend to refuse all public appearance. When the sentence is confirmed, as of course it will be, it will be best for me to confine myself to thinking and writing in solitude and behind the scenes. 'Those also serve who only stand and wait.' The quotation is hackneyed, but it must serve. Through thought and self-proving, I believe that in the end I shall help you best. I am not the fighter I thought I was; the fighter that I ought to be to keep the position that has been so generously given me. Forgive me for a while if I go into the wilderness--a rather absurd phrase, however, as you will agree, when I tell you that I am soon to marry a woman whom I love with my whole heart. But it applies to my connection with the Modernist Movement, and to my position as a leader. My old friends and colleagues--many of them at least--will, I fear, blame the step I am taking. It will seem to them a mere piece of flinching and cowardice. But each man's soul is in his own keeping; and he alone can judge his own powers."

The letter then became a quiet discussion of the best man to be chosen in the writer's stead, and pa.s.sed on into a review of the general situation created by the sentence of the Court of Arches.

But of these later pages of the letter Mary realized nothing. She sat with it in her hands, after she had read the pa.s.sage which has been quoted, looking down, her mouth trembling.

Meynell watched her uneasily--then came to sit by her, and took her hand.

"Dearest!--you understand?" he said, entreatingly.

"It is--because of Hester?" She spoke with difficulty.

He a.s.sented, and then added--

"But that letter--shall only go with your permission."

She took courage. "Richard, you know so much better than I, but--Richard!--did you ever neglect Hester?"

He tried to answer her question truly.

"Not knowingly."

"Did you ever fail to love her, and try to help her?"

He drew a long breath.

"But there she lies!" He raised his head. Through the window, on a rocky slope, half a mile away, could be seen the tiny church of Long Whindale, and the little graveyard round it.

"It is very possible that I see the thing morbidly"--he turned to her again with a note of humility, of sad appeal, that struck most poignantly on the woman's heart--"but I cannot resist it. What use can I be to any human being as guide, or prophet, or counsellor--if I was so little use to her? Is there not a kind of hypocrisy--a dismal hypocrisy--in my claim to teach--or inspire--great mult.i.tudes of people--when this one child--who was given into my care--"

He wrung her hands in his, unable to finish his sentence.

Bright tears stood in her eyes; but she persevered. She struck boldly for the public, the impersonal note. She set against the tragic appeal of the dead the equally tragic appeal of the living. She had in her mind the memory of that London church, with the strained upturned faces, the "hungry sheep"--girls among them, perhaps, in peril like Hester, men a.s.sailed by the same vile impulses that had made a brute of Philip Meryon. During the preceding months Mary's whole personality had developed with great rapidity, after a somewhat taciturn and slowly ripening youth. The need, enforced upon her by love itself, of a.s.serting herself even against the mother she adored; the shadow of Meynell's cloud upon her, and her suffering under it, during the weeks of slander; and now this rending tragedy at her doors--had tempered anew the naturally high heart, and firm will. At this critical moment, she saved Meynell from a fatal step by the capacity she showed of loving his cause, only next to himself. And, indeed, Meynell was made wholesomely doubtful once or twice whether it were not in truth his cause she loved in him. For the sweet breakdowns of love which were always at her lips she banished by a mighty effort, till she should have won or lost. Thus throughout she showed herself her mother's daughter--with her father's thoughts.

It was long, however, before she succeeded in making any real impression upon him. All she could obtain at first was delay, and that Catharine should be informed.

As soon as that had been done, the position became once more curiously complex. Here was a woman to whom the whole Modernist Movement was anathema, driven finally into argument for the purpose of compelling the Modernist leader, the contriver and general of Modernist victory, to remain at his post!

For it was part of Catharine's robust character to look upon any pledge, any accepted responsibility, as something not to be undone by any mere feeling, however sharp, however legitimate. You had undertaken the thing, and it must, at all costs, be carried through. That was the dominant habit of her mind; and there were persons connected with her on whom the rigidity of it had at times worked harshly.

On this occasion it was no doubt interfered with--(the Spirit of Comedy would have found a certain high satisfaction in the dilemma)--by the fact that Meynell's persistence in the course he had entered upon must be, in her eyes, and _sub specie religionis_, a persistence in heresy and unbelief. What decided it ultimately, however, was that she was not only an orthodox believer, but a person of great common sense--and Mary's mother.

Her natural argument was that after the tragic events which had occurred, and the public reports of them which had appeared, Meynell's abrupt withdrawal from public life would once more unsettle and confuse the public mind. If there had been any change in his opinions--

"Oh! do not imagine"--she turned a suddenly glowing face upon him--"I should be trying to dissuade you, if that were your reason. No!--it is for personal and private reasons you shrink from the responsibility of leadership. And that being so, what must the world say--the ignorant world that loves to think evil?"

He looked at her a little reproachfully.

"Those are not arguments that come very naturally from you!"

"They are the right ones!--and I am not ashamed of them. My dear friend--I am not thinking of you at all. I leave you out of count; I am thinking of Alice--and--Mary!"

Catharine unconsciously straightened herself, a touch of something resentful--nay, stern--in the gesture. Meynell stared in stupefaction.

"Alice!--_Mary_!" he said.

"Up to this last proposed action of yours, has not everything that has happened gone to soften people's hearts? to make them repent doubly of their scandal, and their false witness? Every one knows the truth now--every one who cares; and every one understands. But now--after the effort poor Alice has made--after all that she and you have suffered--you insist on turning fresh doubt and suspicion on yourself, your motives, your past history. Can't you see how people may gossip about it--how they may interpret it? You have no right to do it, my dear Richard!--no right whatever. Your 'good report' belongs not only to yourself--but--to Mary!"

Catharine's breath had quickened; her hand shook upon her knee. Meynell rose from his seat, paced the room and came back to her.

"I have tried to explain to Mary"--he said, desperately--"that I should feel myself a hypocrite and pretender in playing the part of a spiritual leader--when this great--failure--lay upon my conscience."

At that Catharine's tension gave way. Perplexity returned upon her.

"Oh! if it meant--if it meant"--she looked at him with a sudden, sweet timidity--"that you felt you had tried to do for Hester what only grace--what only a living Redeemer--could do for her--"

She broke off. But at last, as Meynell, her junior by fifteen years--her son almost--looked down into her face--her frail, aging, illumined face--there was something in the pa.s.sion of her faith which challenged and roused his own; which for the moment, at any rate, and for the first time since the crisis had arisen revived in him the "fighter" he had tried to shed.

"The fault was not in the thing preached," he said, with a groan; "or so it seems to me--but in the preacher. The preacher--was unequal to the message."

Catharine was silent. And after a little more pacing he said in a more ordinary tone--and a humble one--

"Does Mary share this view of yours?"

At this Catharine was almost angry.