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The Case of Richard Meynell

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




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 passion 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.

"As if I should say a word to her about it! Does she know--has she ever
known--what you and I knew?"

His eyes, full of trouble, propitiated her. He took her hand and kissed
it.

"Bear with me, dear mother! I don't see my way, but Mary--is to me--my
life. At any rate, I won't do in a hurry what you disapprove."

Thus a little further delay was gained. The struggle lasted indeed
another couple of days, and the aspect of both Meynell and Mary showed
deep marks of it by the end. Throughout it Mary made little or no appeal
to the mere womanly arts. And perhaps it was the repression of them that
cost her most.

On the third day of discussion, while the letter still lay unposted in
Meynell's writing-case, he went wandering by himself up the valley. The
weather was soft again, and breathing spring. The streams ran free; the
buds were swelling on the sycamores; and except on the topmost crags the
snow had disappeared from the fells. Harsh and austere the valley was
still; the winter's grip would be slow to yield; but the turn of the year
had come.

That morning a rush of correspondence forwarded from Upcote had brought
matters to a crisis. On the days immediately following the publication of
the evidence given at the inquest on Hester the outside world had made no
sign. All England knew now why Richard Meynell had disappeared from the
Arches Trial, only to become again the prey of an enormous publicity, as
one of the witnesses to the finding and the perishing of his young ward.
And after Alice Puttenham's statement in the Coroner's Court, for a few
days the England interested in Richard Meynell simply held its breath
and let him be.

But he belonged to the public; and after just the brief respite that
decency and sympathy imposed, the public fell upon him. The Arches
verdict had been given; the appeal to the Privy Council had been lodged.
With every month of the struggle indeed, as the Modernist attack had
grown more determined, and its support more widespread, so the orthodox
defence had gathered force and vehemence. Yet through the length and
breadth of the country the Modernist petition to Parliament was now
kindling such a fire as no resistance could put out. Debate in the House
of Commons on the Modernist proposals for Church Reform would begin after
Easter. Already every member of the House was being bombarded from both
sides by his constituents. Such a heat of religious feeling, such a
passion of religious hope and fear, had not been seen in England for
generations.

And meanwhile Meynell, whose action had first released the great forces
now at work, who as a leader was now doubly revered, doubly honoured by
those who clamoured to be led by him, still felt himself utterly
unable to face the struggle. Heart and brain were the prey of a deadly
discouragement; the will could make no effort; his confidence in himself
was lamed and helpless. Not even the growing strength and intensity of
his love for Mary could set him, it seemed, spiritually, on his feet.

He left the old bridge on his left, and climbed the pass. And as he
walked, some words of Newman possessed him; breathed into his ear through
all the wind and water voices of the valley:

_Thou_ to wax fierce
In the cause of the Lord
To threat and to pierce
With the heavenly sword!
Anger and Zeal
And the Joy of the brave
Who bade _thee_ to feel--

Dejectedly, he made his way along the fatal path; he found the ruin where
Hester had sheltered; he gradually identified the route which the rescue
party had taken along the side of the fell; and the precipitous scree
where they had found her. The freshly disturbed earth and stones still
showed plainly where she had fallen, and where he and the shepherds had
stood, trampling the ground round her. He sat down beside the spot,
haunted by the grim memory of that helpless, bleeding form amid the snow.
Not yet nineteen!--disgraced--ruined--the young body broken in its prime.
Had he been able to do no better for Neville's child than that? The load
of responsibility crushed him; and he could not resign himself to such a
fate for such a human being. Before him, on the chill background of the
tells, he beheld, perpetually, the two Hesters: here, the radiant,
unmanageable child, clad in the magic of her teasing, provocative beauty;
there, the haggard and dying girl, violently wrenched from life.
Religious faith was paralyzed within him. How could he--a man so disowned
of God--prophesy to his brethren?....

Thus there descended upon him the darkest hour of his history. It was
simply a struggle for existence on the part of all those powers of the
soul that make for action, against the forces that make for death and
inertia.

It lasted long; and it ended in the slow and difficult triumph, the final
ascendency of the "Yeas" of Life over the "Nays," which in truth his
character secured. He won the difficult fight not as a philosopher, but
as a Christian; impelled, chastened, brought into line again, by purely
Christian memories and Christian ideas. The thought of Christ healed
him--gradually gave him courage to bear an agony of self-criticism,
self-reproach, that was none the less overwhelming because his calmer
mind, looking on, knew it to be irrational. There was no prayer to
Christ, no "Christe eleison" on his rips. But there was a solemn kneeling
by the Cross; a solemn opening of the mind to the cleansing and
strengthening forces that flow from that life and death which are
Christendom's central possession; the symbol through which, now
understood in this way, now in that, the Eternal speaks to the Christian
soul.

So, amid "the cheerful silence of the fells," a good man, heavily, took
back his task. From this wreck of affection, this ruin of hope, he must
go forth to preach love and hope to other men; from the depths of his
grief and his defeat he must summon others to struggle and victory.

He submitted.

Then--not till then--naked and stripped as he was of all personal
complacency; smarting under the conviction of personal weakness and
defeat; tormented still, as he would ever be, by all the "might have
beens" of Hester's story, he was conscious of the "supersensual
moment," the inrush of Divine strength, which at some time or other
rewards the life of faith.

On his way back to Burwood through the gleams and shadows of the valley,
he turned aside to lay a handful of green moss on the new-made grave.
There was a figure beside it. It was Mary, who had been planting
snowdrops. He helped her, and then they descended to the main road
together. Looking at his face, she hardly dared, close as his hand clung
to hers, to break the silence.

It was dusk, and there was no one in sight. In the shelter of a group of
trees, he drew her to him.

"You have your way," he said, sadly.

She trembled a little, her delicate cheek close against his.

"Have I persecuted you?"

He smiled.

"You have taught me what the strength of my wife's will is going to be."

She winced visibly, and the tears came into her eyes.

"Dearest!--" he protested. "Must you not be strong? But for you--I should
have gone under."

The primitive instinct of the woman, in this hour of painful victory,
would have dearly liked to disavow her own power. The thought of ruling
her beloved was odious. Yet as they walked on hand in hand, the modern
in Mary prevailed, and she must needs accept the equal rights of a love
which is also life's supreme friendship.

A few more days Meynell spent in the quiet of the valley, recovering, as
best he could, and through a struggle constantly renewed, some normal
steadiness of mood and nerve; dealing with an immense correspondence;
and writing the Dunchester sermon; while Stephen Barron, who had already
resigned his own living, was looking after the Upcote Church and parish.
Meanwhile Alice Puttenham lay upstairs in one of the little white rooms
of Burwood, so ill that the doctors would not hear of her being moved.
Edith Fox-Wilton had proposed to come and nurse her, in spite of "this
shocking business which had disgraced us all." But Catharine at Alice's
entreaty had merely appealed to the indisputable fact that the tiny house
was already more than full. There was no danger, and they had a good
trained nurse.

Once or twice it was, in these days, that again a few passing terrors ran
through Mary's mind, on the subject of her mother. The fragility which
had struck Meynell's unaccustomed eye when he first arrived in the valley
forced itself now at times, though only at times, on her reluctant sense.
There were nights when, without any definite reason, she could not sleep
for anxiety. And then again the shadow entirely passed away. Catharine
laughed at her; and when the moment came for Mary to follow Meynell to
the Dunchester meeting, it was impossible even for her anxious love to
persuade itself that there was good reason for her to stay away.

* * * * *

Before Meynell departed southward there was a long conversation between
him and Alice; and it was at her wish, to which he now finally yielded,
that he went straight to Markborough, to an interview with Bishop Craye.

In that interview the Bishop learnt at last the whole story of Hester's
birth and of her tragic death. The beauty of Meynell's relation to the
mother and child was plainly to be seen through a very reticent
narrative; and to the tale of those hours in Long Whindale no man of
heart like the little Bishop could have listened unmoved. At the end, the
two men clasped hands in silence; and the Bishop looked wistfully at the
priest that he and the diocese were so soon to lose.

For the rest, as before, they met as equals, curiously congenial to each
other, in spite of the battle in front. The Bishop's certainty of victory
was once more emphatically shown by the friendly ease with which he still
received his rebellious incumbent. Any agreeable outsider of whatever
creed--Renan or Loisy or Tyrrell--might have been thus welcomed at the
Palace. It was true that till the appeal was decided Meynell remained
formally Rector of Upcote Minor. The church and the parish were still in
his hands; and the Bishop pointedly made no reference to either. But a
very few weeks now would see Meynell's successor installed, and the
parish reduced to order.

Such at least was the Bishop's confidence, and in the position in which
he found himself--with seven Modernist evictions pending in his diocese,
and many more than seven recalcitrant parishes to deal with, he was not
the man to make needless friction.

In Meynell's view, indeed, the Bishop's confidence was excessive; and the
triumph of the orthodox majority in the Church, if indeed it were to
triumph, was neither so near, nor likely to be so complete, as the Bishop
believed. He had not yet been able to resume all the threads of
leadership, but he was clear that there had been no ebbing whatever of
the Modernist tide. On the contrary, it seemed to him that the function
at Dunchester might yet ring through England, and startle even such
an optimist as Bishop Craye.

The next few days he spent among his own people, and with the Flaxmans.
The old red sandstone church of Upcote Minor was closely packed on
Sunday; and the loyalty of the parish to their Rector, their answer
to the Arches judgment, was shown in the passion, the loving intelligence
with which every portion of the beautiful Modernist service was followed
by an audience of working men and women gathered both from Upcote
itself and from the villages round, who knew very well--and gloried in
the fact--that from their midst had started the flame now running through
the country. Many of them had been trained by Methodism, and were now
returning to the Church that Wesley had been so loath to leave. "The
Rector's changed summat," said men to each other, puzzled by that
aspect--that unconscious aspect--of spiritual dignity that falls like
a robe of honour, as life goes on, about the Knights of the Spirit. But
they knew, at least, from their newspapers, how and when that beautiful
girl who had grown up from a child in their midst had perished; they
remembered the winter months of calumny and persecution; and their rough,
kind hearts went out to the man who was so soon, against their will and
their protest, to be driven out from the church where for twenty years he
had preached to his people a Christ they could follow, and a God they
could adore.

The week passed, and the Dunchester meeting was at hand. Meynell was to
spend the night before the great service with the old Bishop, against
whom--together with the whole of his Chapter--Privy Council action
was now pending. Mary was to be the guest of one of the Canons in the
famous Close.

Meynell arrived to find the beautiful old town in commotion. As a protest
against the Modernist demonstration, all the students from a famous
Theological College in a neighbouring diocese under a High Church bishop
had come over to attend a rival service in the second church of the town,
where the congregation was to be addressed "on this outrage to our Lord"
by one of the ablest and most saintly of the orthodox leaders--the Rev.
Cyril Fenton, of the Markborough diocese--soon, it was rumoured, to be
appointed to a Canonry of St. Paul's. The streets were full of rival
crowds, jostling each other. Three hundred Modernist clergy were staying
in or near the town; the old Cathedral city stared at them amazed; and
from all parts had come, besides, the lay followers of the new Movement
thronging to a day which represented for them the first fruits of a
harvest, whereof not they perhaps but their children would see the full
reaping.

On the evening before the function Meynell went into the Cathedral with
Mary just as the lengthening March afternoon was beginning to wane. They
stepped through the western doors set open to the breeze and the sunshine
into a building all opal and ebony, faintly flooded with rose from the
sky without; a building of infinite height and majesty, where clustered
columns of black marble, incredibly light, upheld the richness of the
bossed roof, where every wall was broidered history, where every step was
on "the ruined sides of Kings," and the gathered fragments of ancient
glass, jewels themselves, let through a jewelled light upon the creamy
stone.

For the first time, since Hester's death, Meynell's sad face broke into
joy. The glorious church appeared to him as the visible attestation of
the Divine creative life in men, flowing on endlessly, from the Past,
through the Present, to the unknown Future.

From the distance came a sound of chanting. They walked slowly up the
nave, conscious of a strange tumult in the pulse, as though the great
building with its immemorial history were half lending itself to, half
resisting, the emotion that filled them. In the choir a practice was
going on. Some thirty young clergy were going through the responses and
canticles of the new service-book, with an elder man, also in clerical
dress, directing them. At the entrance of the southern choir aisle stood
the senior verger of the Cathedral in his black gown--open-mouthed and
motionless, listening to the strange sounds.

Meynell and Mary knelt for a moment of impassioned prayer, and then sat
down to listen. Through the fast darkening church, chanted by half the
choir, there stole those words of noblest poetry:

"_A new commandment_--_a new commandment--I give unto you_ ..." To be
answered by the voices on the other side--"_That ye love--ye love one
another_!"

And again:

"_I have called you friends. Ye are my friends_"--

With the reply:

"_If ye do the things which I command you_."

And yet again:

"_The words that I speak unto you_:"--

"_They--they are spirit; and they are life_!"

A moment's silence, before all the voices, gathering into one harmony,
sent the last versicle ringing through the arches of the choir, and the
springing tracery of the feretory, and of the Lady Chapel beyond.

"_Lord to whom shall we go?--Thou--thou hast the words of eternal life_!"

"Only a few days or weeks," murmured Meynell, as they passed out into the
evening light, "and we two--and those men singing there--shall be
outcasts and wanderers, perhaps for a time, perhaps while we live.
But to-day--and to-morrow--we are still children in the house of our
fathers--sons, not slaves!--speaking the free speech of our own day in
these walls, as the men who built them did in theirs. That joy, at least,
no one shall take from us!"

At that "sad word Joy" Mary slipped her hand into his, and so they walked
silently through the Close, toward the Palace, pursued by the rise and
fall of the music from within.

The great service was over, with its bold adaptation of the religious
language of the past, the language which is wrought into the being of
Christendom, to the needs and the knowledge of the present. And now
Meynell had risen, and was speaking to that thronged nave, crowded
by men and women of many types and many distinctions, with that mingling
of passion and simplicity which underlies success in all the poetic
arts, and, first and foremost, the art of religious oratory. The
sermon was to be known in after years by the name of "The Two
Christianities"--and became one of the chief landmarks, or, rather,
rallying cries of the Modernist cause. Only some fragments of it can be
suggested here; one passage, above all, that Mary's brooding memory will
keep close and warm to her life's end:

"...Why are we here, my friends? For what purpose is this great
demonstration, this moving rite in, which we have joined this day?
One-sixth at least of this congregation stands here under a sentence of
ecclesiastical death. A few weeks perhaps, and this mighty church will
know its white-haired Bishop no more. Bishop and Chapter will have been
driven out; and we, the rank and file, whose only desire is to cling to
the Church in which we were baptized and bred, will find ourselves exiles
and homeless.

"What is our crime? This only--that God has spoken in our consciences,
and we have not been able to resist Him. Nor dare we desert our posts in
the National Church, till force drive us out. Why? Because there is
something infinitely greater at stake than any reproach that can be
hurled at us on the ground of broken pledges--pledges made too early,
given in ignorance and good faith, and broken now, solemnly, in the face
of God and this people--for a greater good. What does our personal
consistency--which, mind you, is a very different thing from personal
honesty!--matter? We are as sensitive as any man who attacks us on the
point of personal honour. But we are constrained of God; we bear in our
hands the cause of our brethren, the cause of half the nation; and we can
no other. Ask yourselves what we have to gain by it. Nay! With expulsion
and exile in sight--with years perhaps of the wilderness before us--we
stand here for the liberties of Christ's Church!--its liberties of growth
and life....

"My friends, what is the life either of intellect or spirit but the
response of man to the communication of God? Age by age, man's
consciousness cuts deeper into the vast mystery that surrounds us;
absorbs, transmutes, translates ever more of truth, into conceptions he
can use, and language he can understand.

"From this endless process arise science--and history--and philosophy.
But just as science, and history, and philosophy change with this
ever-living and growing advance, so religion--man's ideas of God and his
own soul.

"Within the last hundred years man's knowledge of the physical world has
broadened beyond the utmost dreams of our fathers. But of far greater
importance to man is his knowledge of himself. There, too, the century
of which we are now the heirs has lifted the veil--for us first among
living men--from secrets hitherto unknown. HISTORY has come into being.

"What is history? Simply the power--depending upon a thousand laborious
processes--of constructing a magic lens within the mind which allows us
to look deep into the past, to see its life and colour and movement
again, as no generation but our own has yet been able to see it. We hold
our breath sometimes, as for a brief moment perhaps we catch its very
gesture, its very habit as it lived, the very tone of its voices. It has
been a new and marvellous gift of our God to us; and it has transformed
or is transforming Christianity.

"Like science, this new discipline of the human mind is divine and
authoritative. It lessens the distance between our human thought and the
thought of God, because, in the familiar phrase, it enables us to "think,
in some sort, His thoughts after Him." Like science it marches slowly on
its way; through many mistakes; through hypothesis and rectification;
through daring vision and laborious proof; to an ever-broadening
certainty. History has taken hold of the Christian tradition. History has
worked upon it with an amazing tenderness, and patience, and reverence.
And at the end of a hundred years what do we see?--that half of
Christendom, at least, which we in this church represent?

"We see a Christ stripped of Jewish legend, and Greek speculation, and
medieval scholasticism; moving simply and divinely among the ways of His
Jewish world, a man among men. We can watch, dimly indeed by comparison
with our living scrutiny of living men, but still more clearly than any
generation of Christendom since the disappearance of the first has been
able to watch, the rise of His thoughts, the nature of His environment,
the sequence of His acts, the original significance, the immediate
interpretation, the subsequent influence of His death. We know much more
of Jesus of Nazareth than the fathers of Nicaea knew; probably than St.
Paul knew; certainly than Irenaeus or Clement knew.

"But that is only half the truth; only half of what history has to tell.
On the one side we have to do with the recovered fact: on the other with
its working through two thousand years upon the world.

"_There,_ for the Modernist, lies revelation!--in the unfolding of the
Christian idea, through the successive stages of human thought and
imagination, it has traversed, down to the burst of revelation in the
present day. Yet we are only now at the beginning of an immense
development. The content of the Christian idea of love--love,
self-renouncing, self-fulfilling--is infinite, inexhaustible, like that
of beauty, or of truth. Why? At this moment, I am only concerned to give
you the Christian answer, which is the answer of a reasonable faith.
Because, like the streams springing forever from 'the pure founts of
Cephisus,' to nourish the swelling plains below, these governing ideas of
our life--tested by life, confirmed by life--have their source in the
very being of God, sharers in His Eternity, His Ever-Fruitfulness....

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