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The Case of Richard Meynell

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> The Case of Richard Meynell




"You may be sure she'll please _me_!" said Barron suddenly, flushing
deeply.

The Rector looked up, startled.

"I say?"

Barron cleared his throat.

"I'd better tell you at once, Rector. I got Hester's leave yesterday
to tell you, when an opportunity occurred--you know how fond she is
of you? Well, I'm in love with her--head over ears in love with her--I
believe I have been since she was a little girl in the schoolroom. And
yesterday--she said--she'd marry me some day."

The young voice betrayed a natural tremor. Meanwhile, a strange look--a
close observer would have called it a look of consternation--had rushed
into Meynell's face. He stared at Barron, made one or two attempts to
speak, and, a last, said abruptly:

"That'll never do, Stephen--that'll never do! You shouldn't have spoken."

Barron's face showed the wound.

"But, Rector--"

"She's too young," said Meynell, with increased harshness, "much too
young! Hester is only seventeen. No girl ought to be pledged so early.
She ought to have more time--time to look round her. Promise me, my
dear boy, that there shall be nothing irrevocable--no engagement! I
should strongly oppose it."

The eyes of the two men met. Barron was evidently dumb with surprise; but
the vivacity and urgency of Meynell's expression drove him into speech.

"We thought you would have sympathized," he stammered. "After all, what
is there so much against it? Hester is, you know, not very happy at home.
I have my living, and some income of my own, independent of my father.
Supposing he should object--"

"He would object," said Meynell quickly. "And Lady Fox-Wilton would
certainly object. And so should I. And, as you know, I am co-guardian of
the children with her."

Then, as the lover quivered under these barbs, Meynell suddenly recovered
himself.

"My dear fellow! No woman ought to marry under twenty-one. And every girl
ought to have time to look round her. It's not right; it's not just--it
isn't, indeed! Put this thing by for a while. You'll lose nothing by it.
We'll talk of it again in two years."

And, drawing his chair nearer to his companion, Meynell fell into a
strain of earnest and affectionate entreaty, which presently had a marked
effect on the younger man. His chivalry was appealed to--his
consideration for the girl he loved; and his aspect began to show the
force of the attack. At last he said gravely:

"I'll tell Hester what you say--of course I'll tell her. Naturally we
can't marry without your consent and her mother's. But if Hester persists
in wishing we should be engaged?"

"Long engagements are the deuce!" said the Rector hotly. "You would be
engaged for three years. Madness!--with such a temperament as Hester's.
My dear Stephen, be advised--for her and yourself. There is no one who
wishes your good more earnestly than I. But don't let there be any talk
of an engagement for at least two years to come. Leave her free--even
if you consider yourself bound. It is folly to suppose that a girl of
such marked character knows her own mind at seventeen. She has all her
development to come."

Barron had dropped his head on his hands.

"I couldn't see anybody else courting her--without--"

"Without cutting in. I daresay not," said Meynell, with a rather forced
laugh. "I'd forgive you that. But now, look here."

The two heads drew together again, and Meynell resumed conversation,
talking rapidly, in a kind, persuasive voice, putting the common sense of
the situation--holding out distant hopes. The young man's face gradually
cleared. He was of a docile, open temper, and deeply attached to his
mentor.

At last the Rector sprang up, consulting his watch.

"I must send you off, and go to sleep. But we'll talk of this again."

"Sleep!" exclaimed Barron, astonished. "It's just seven o'clock. What are
you up to now?"

"There's a drunken fellow in the village--dying--and his wife won't look
after him. So I have to put in an appearance to-night. Be off with you!"

"I shouldn't wonder if the Flaxmans were of some use to you in the
village," said Stephen, taking up his hat. "They're rich, and, they say,
very generous."

"Well, if they'll give me a parish nurse, I'll crawl to them," said the
Rector, settling himself in his chair and putting an old shawl over his
knees. "And as you go out, just tell Anne, will you, to keep herself to
herself for an hour and not to disturb me?"

Stephen Barron moved to the door, and as he opened it he turned back a
moment to look at the man in the chair, and the room in which he sat. It
was as though he asked himself by what manner of man he had been
thus gripped and coerced, in a matter so intimate, and, to himself, so
vital.

Meynell's eyes were already shut. The dogs had gathered round him, the
collie's nose laid against his knee, the other two guarding his feet. All
round, the walls were laden with books, so were the floor and the
furniture. A carpenter's bench filled the further end of the room.
Carving tools were scattered on it, and a large piece of wood-carving,
half finished, was standing propped against it. It was part of some choir
decoration that Meynell and a class of village boys were making for the
church, where the Rector had already carved with his own hand many of the
available surfaces, whether of stone or wood. The carving, which was
elaborate and rich, was technically faulty, as an Italian primitive is
faulty, but _mutatis mutandis_ it had much of the same charm that belongs
to Italian primitive work: the same joyous sincerity, the same passionate
love of natural things, leaves and flowers and birds.

For the rest, the furniture of the room was shabby and ugly. The pictures
on the walls were mostly faded Oxford photographs, or outlines by
Overbeck and Retsch, which had belonged to Meynell's parents and were
tenderly cherished by him. There were none of the pretty, artistic
trifles, the signs of travel and easy culture, which many a small country
vicarage possesses in abundance. Meynell, in spite of his scholar's
mastery of half-a-dozen languages, had never crossed the Channel. Barron,
lingering at the door, with his eyes on the form by the fire, knew why.
The Rector had always been too poor. He had been left an orphan while
still at Balliol, and had to bring up his two younger brothers. He had
done it. They were both in Canada now and prospering. But the signs of
the struggle were on this shabby house, and on this shabby, frugal,
powerfully built man. Yet now he might have been more at ease; the
living, though small, was by no means among the worst in the diocese.
Ah, well! Anne, the housekeeper and only servant, knew how the money
went--and didn't go, and she had passed on some of her grievances to
Barron. They two knew--though Barron would never have dared to show his
knowledge--what a wrestle it meant to get the Rector to spend what was
decently necessary on his own food and clothes; and Anne spent hours of
the night in indignantly guessing at what he spent on the clothes and
food of other people--mostly, in her opinion, "varmints."

These things flitted vaguely through the young man's sore mind. Then in a
flash they were absorbed in a perception of a wholly different kind. The
room seemed to him transfigured; a kind of temple. He thought of the
intellectual life which had been lived there; the passion for truth which
had burnt in it; the sermons and books that had been written on those
crowded tables; the personality and influence that had been gradually
built up within it, so that to him, as to many others, the dingy study
was a place of pilgrimage, breathing inspiration; and his heart went out,
first in discipleship, and then in a pain that was not for himself. For
over his friend's head he saw the gathering of clouds not now to be
scattered or dispersed; and who could foretell the course of the storm?

The young man gently closed the door and went his
way. He need not have left the house so quietly. The
Rector got no sleep that evening.




CHAPTER II


The church clock of Upcote Minor was just striking nine o'clock as
Richard Meynell, a few hours later than the conversation just recorded,
shut the Rectory gate behind him, and took his way up the village.

The night was cold and gusty. The summer this year had forgotten to be
balmy, and Meynell, who was an ardent sun-lover, shivered as he walked
along, buttoning a much-worn parson's coat against the sharp air. Before
him lay the long, straggling street, with its cottages and small shops,
its post-office, and public-houses, and its occasional gentlefolks'
dwellings, now with a Georgian front plumb on the street, and now hidden
behind walls and trees. It was evidently a large village, almost a
country town, with a considerable variety of life. At this hour of the
evening most of the houses were dark, for the labourers had gone to bed.
But behind the drawn blinds of the little shops there were still lights
here and there, and in the houses of the gentility.

The Rector passed the fine perpendicular church standing back from the
road, with its churchyard about it; and just beyond it, he turned, his
pace involuntarily slackening, to look at a small gabled house,
surrounded by a garden, and overhung by a splendid lime tree. Suddenly,
as he approached it, the night burst into fragrance, for a gust of wind
shook the lime-blossom, and flung the scent in Meynell's face; while at
the same time the dim masses of roses in the garden sent out their
sweetness to the passers-by.

A feeling of pleasure, quick, involuntary, passed through his mind;
pleasure in the thought of what these flowers meant to the owner of them.
He had a vision of a tall and slender woman, no longer young, with a
delicate and plaintive face, moving among the rose-beds she loved, her
light dress trailing on the grass. The recollection stirred in him
affection, and an impulse of sympathy, stronger than the mere thought of
the flowers, and the woman's tending of them, could explain. It passed
indeed immediately into something else--a touch of new and sharp anxiety.

"And she's been very peaceful of late," he said to himself ruefully, "as
far at least as Hester ever lets her be. Preston's wife was a godsend.
Perhaps now she'll come out of her shell and go more among the people. It
would help her. Anyway, we can't have everything rooted up again just
yet--before the time."

He walked on, and as the farther corner of the house came into view, he
saw a thinly curtained window with a light inside it, and it seemed to
him that he distinguished a figure within.

"Reading?--or embroidering? Probably, at her work. She had that
commission to finish. Busy woman!"

He fell to imagining the little room, the embroidery frame, the books,
and the brindled cat on the rug, of no particular race or beauty; for use
not for show; but sensitive and gentle like its mistress, and like her,
not to be readily made friends with.

"How wise of her," he thought, "not to accept her sister's offer since
Ralph's death--to insist on keeping her little house and her
independence. Imagine her!--prisoned in that house, with that family.
Except for Hester--except for Hester!"

He smiled sadly to himself, threw a last troubled look at the little
house, and left it behind him. Before him, the village street, with its
green and its pond, widened under the scudding sky. Far ahead, about a
quarter of a mile away, among surrounding trees, certain outlines were
visible through the July twilight. The accustomed eye knew them for the
chimneys of the Fox-Wiltons' house, owned now, since the recent death
of its master, Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton, by his widow, the sister of the lady
with the cat and the embroidery, and mother of many children, for the
most part an unattractive brood, peevish and slow-minded like their
father. Hester was the bright, particular star in that house, as Stephen
Barron had now found out.

Alack!--alack! The Rector's face resumed for a moment the expression of
painful or brooding perplexity it had worn during his conversation of the
afternoon with young Barron, on the subject of Hester Fox-Wilton.

Another light in a window--and a sound of shouting and singing. The
"Cowroast," a "public" mostly frequented by the miners who inhabited the
northern end of the village, was evidently doing trade. The Rector did
not look up as he passed it; but in general he turned an indulgent eye
upon it. Before entering upon the living, he had himself worked for a
month as an ordinary miner, in the colliery whose tall chimneys could be
seen to the east above the village roofs. His body still vividly retained
the physical memory of those days--of the aching muscles, and the
gargantuan thirsts.

At last the rows of new-built cottages attached to the colliery came
in view on the left; to the right, a steep hillside heavily wooded,
and at the top of it, in the distance, the glimmering of a large white
house--stately and separate--dominating the village, the church, the
collieries, and the Fox-Wiltons' plantations.

The Rector threw a glance at it. It was from that house had come the
letter he had found on his hall-table that afternoon; a letter in a
handwriting large and impressive like the dim house on the hill. The
handwriting of a man accustomed to command, whether his own ancestral
estate, or the collieries which had been carved out of its fringe, or the
village spreading humbly at his feet, or the church into which he walked
on Sunday with heavy tread, and upright carriage, conscious of his
threefold dignity--as squire, magistrate, and churchwarden.

"It's my business to fight him!" Meynell thought, looking at the house,
and squaring his broad shoulders unconsciously. "It's not my business to
hate him--not at all--rather to respect and sympathize with him. I
provoke the fight--and I may be thankful to have lit on a strong
antagonist. What's Stephen afraid of? What can they do? Let 'em try!"

A smile--contemptuous and good-humoured--crossed the Rector's face. Any
angry bigot determined to rid his parish of a heretical parson might no
doubt be tempted to use other than legal and theological weapons, if he
could get them. A heretic with unpaid bills and some hidden vice is
scarcely in a position to make much of his heresy. But the Rector's smile
showed him humorously conscious of an almost excessive innocence of
private life. The thought of how little an enemy could find to lay hold
on in his history or present existence seemed almost to bring with it a
kind of shamefacedness--as for experience irrevocably foregone, warm,
tumultuous, human experience, among the sinners and sufferers of the
world. For there are odd, mingled moments in the lives of most scholars
and saints--like Renan in his queer envy of Théophile Gautier--when such
men inevitably ask themselves whether they have not missed something
irreplaceable, the student, by his learning--the saint even, by his
goodness.

Here now was "Miners' Row." As the Rector approached the cottage of which
he was in search the clouds lightened in the east, and a pale moonshine,
suffusing the dusk, showed in the far distance beyond the village, the
hills of Fitton Chase, rounded, heathy hills, crowned by giant firs.
Meynell looked at them with longing, and a sudden realization of his own
weariness. A day or two, perhaps a week or two, among the fells, with
their winds and scents about him, and their streams in his ears--he must
allow himself that, before the fight began.

No. 8. A dim light showed in the upper window. The Rector knocked at the
door. A woman opened--a young and sweet-looking nurse in her bonnet and
long cloak.

"You look pretty done!" exclaimed the Rector. "Has he been giving
trouble?"

"Oh, no, sir, not more than usual. It's the two of them."

"She won't go to her sister's?"

"She won't stir a foot, sir."

"Where is she?" The nurse pointed to the living-room on her left.

"She scarcely eats anything--a sup of tea sometimes. And I doubt whether
she sleeps at all."

"And she won't go to him?"

"If he were dying, and she alone with him in the house, I don't believe
she'd go near him."

The Rector stepped in and asked a few questions as to arrangements for
the night. The patient, it seemed, was asleep, in consequence of a
morphia injection, and likely to remain so for an hour or two. He was
dying of an internal injury inflicted by a fall of rock in the mine
some ten days before. Surgery had done what it could, but signs of
blood-poisoning had appeared, and the man's days were numbered.

The doctor had left written instructions, which the nurse handed over to
Meynell. If certain symptoms appeared, the doctor was to be summoned. But
in all probability the man's fine constitution, injured though it had
been by drink, would enable him to hold out another day or two. And the
hideous pain of the first week had now ceased; mortification had almost
certainly set in, and all that could be done was to wait the slow and
sure failure of the heart.

The nurse took leave. Meynell was hanging up his hat in the little
passageway, when the door of the front parlour opened, after being
unlocked.

Meynell looked round.

"Good evening, Mrs. Bateson. You are coming upstairs, I hope, with me?"

He spoke gently, but with a quiet authority.

The woman in the doorway shook her head. She was thin and narrow-chested.
Her hair was already gray, though she could not have been more than
thirty-five, and youth and comeliness had been long since battered
from her face, partly by misery of mind, partly by direct ill usage of
which there were evident traces. She looked steadily at the Rector.

"I'm not going," she said. "He's nowt to me. But I'd like to know what
the doctor was thinkin' of him."

"The doctor thinks he may live through to-night and to-morrow night--not
much more. He is your husband, Mrs. Bateson, and whatever you have
against him, you'll be very sorry afterward if you don't give him help
and comfort in his death. Come up now, I beg of you, and watch with me.
He might die at any moment."

And Meynell put out his hand kindly toward the woman standing in the
shadow, as though to lead her.

But she stepped backward.

"I know what I'm about," she said, breathing quick. "He made a fule o' me
wi' that wanton Lizzie Short, and he near killt me the last morning afore
he went. And I'd been a good wife to him for fifteen year, and never
a word between us till that huzzy came along. And she's got a child by
him, and he must go and throw it in my face that I'd never given him one.
And he struck and cursed me that last morning--he wished me dead, he
said. And I sat and prayed God to punish him. An' He did. The roof came
down on him. And now he mun die. I've done wi' him--and she's done wi'
him. He's made his bed, and he mun lig on it."

The Rector put up his hand sternly.

"Don't! Mrs. Bateson. Those are words you'll repent when you yourself
come to die. He has sinned toward you--but remember!--he's a young man
still--in the prime of life. He has suffered horribly--and he has only a
few hours or days to live. He has asked for you already to-day, he is
sure to ask for you to-night. Forgive him!--ask God to help him to die in
peace!"

While he spoke she stood motionless, impassive. Meynell's voice had
beautiful inflections, and he spoke with strong feeling. Few persons whom
he so addressed could have remained unmoved. But Mrs. Bateson only
retreated farther into the dreary little parlour, with its wool mats and
antimacassars, and a tray of untasted tea on the table. She passed her
tongue round her dry lips to moisten them before she spoke, quite calmly:

"Thank you, sir. Thank you. You mean well. But we must all judge for
ourselves. If there's anything you want I can get for you, you knock
twice on the floor--I shall hear you. But I'm not comin' up."

Meynell turned away discouraged, and went upstairs. In the room above lay
the dying man--breathing quickly and shallowly under the influence of the
drug that had been given him. The nurse had raised him on his pillows,
and the window near him was open. His powerful chest was uncovered, and
he seemed even in his sleep to be fighting for air. In the twelve hours
that had elapsed since Meynell had last seen him he had travelled with
terrible rapidity toward the end. He looked years older than in the
morning; it was as though some sinister hand had been at work on the
face, expanding here, contracting there, substituting chaos and
nothingness for the living man.

The Rector sat down beside him. The room was small and bare--a little
strip of carpet on the boards, a few chairs, and a little table with food
and nourishment beside the bed. On the mantelpiece was a large printed
card containing the football fixtures of the winter before. Bateson had
once been a fine player. Of late years, however, his interest had been
confined to betting heavily on the various local and county matches, and
it was to his ill-luck as a gambler no less than to the influence of the
flimsy little woman who had led him astray that his moral break-up might
be traced.

A common tale!--yet more tragic than usual. For the bedroom contained
other testimonies to the habits of a ruined man. There was a hanging
bookcase on the wall, and the Rector sitting by the bed could just make
out the titles of the books in the dim light.

Mill, Huxley, a reprint of Tom Paine, various books by Blatchford, the
sixpenny editions of "Literature and Dogma," and Renan's "Life of
Christ," some popular science volumes of Browning and Ruskin, and a group
of well-thumbed books on the birds of Mercia--the little collection,
hardly earned, and, to judge from its appearance, diligently read, showed
that its owner had been a man of intelligence. The Rector looked from it
to the figure in the bed with a pang at his heart.

All was still in the little cottage. Through the open window the Rector
could see fold after fold of the Chase stretching north and west above
the village. The moorland ridges shone clear under the moon, now bare, or
scantily plumed by gaunt trees, and now clothed in a dense blackness of
wood. Meynell, who knew every yard of the great heath and loved it well,
felt himself lifted there in spirit as he looked. The "bunchberries" must
just be ripening on the high ground--nestling scarlet and white amid
their glossy leaves. And among them and beside them, the taller, slender
bilberries, golden green; the exquisite grasses of the heath, pale pink,
and silver, and purple, swaying in the winds, clothing acre after acre
with a beauty beyond the looms of men; the purple heather and the ling
flushing toward its bloom: and the free-limbed scattered birch trees,
strongly scrawled against the sky. The scurry of the clouds over the
purple sweeps of moor, the beat of the wind, and then suddenly, pools of
fragrant air sun-steeped--he drew in the thought of it all, as he might
have drunk the moorland breeze itself, with a thrill of pleasure, which
passed at once into a movement of soul.

"_My God--my God_!"

No other words imagined or needed. Only a leap of the heart, natural,
habitual, instinctive, from the imagined beauty of the heath, to the
"Eternal Fountain" of all beauty.

The hand of the dying man made a faint rustling with the sheet. Meynell,
checked, rebuked almost, by the slight sound, bent his eyes again on the
sleeper, and leaning forward tried to meditate and pray. But to-night he
found it hard. He realized anew his physical and mental fatigue, and a
certain confused clamour of thought, strangely persistent behind the more
external experience alike of body and mind; like the murmur of a distant
sea heard from far inland, as the bond and background of all lesser
sounds.

The phrases of the letter he had found on the hall-table recurred to him
whether he would or no. They were mainly legal and technical, intimating
that an application had been made to the Bishop of Markborough to issue a
Commission of Inquiry into certain charges made by parishioners of Upcote
Minor against the Rector of the parish. The writer of the letter was one
of the applicants, and gave notice of his intention to prosecute the
charges named, with the utmost vigour through all the stages prescribed
by ecclesiastical law.

But it was, rather, some earlier letters from the same hand--letters more
familiar, intimate, and discursive--that ultimately held the Rector's
thoughts as he kept his watch. For in those letters were contained almost
all the objections that a sensitive mind and heart had had to grapple
with before determining on the course to which the Rector of Upcote was
now committed. They were the voice of the "adversary," the "accuser."
Crude or conventional, as the form of the argument might be, it yet
represented the "powers and principalities" to be reckoned with. If the
Rector's conscience could not sustain him against it, he was henceforth a
dishonest and unhappy man; and when his lawyers had failed to protect him
against its practical result--as they must no doubt fail--he would be a
dispossessed priest:

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