The Case of Richard Meynell Part 10

As they paused on the top of a rising ground looking westward he looked at her with sudden and kindly decision.

"Miss Elsmere, are you sure your mother would like to see me? It was very good of you to request that I should accompany you to-night--but--are you sure?"

Mary coloured deeply and hesitated a moment.

"Don't you think I'd better turn back?" he asked her, gently. "Your path is clear before you." He pointed to it winding through the fern. "And you know, I hope, that anything I could do for you and your mother during your stay here I should be only too enchanted to do. The one thing I shrink from doing is to interfere in any way with her rest here. And I am afraid just now I might be a disturbing element."

"No, no! please come!" said Mary, earnestly. Then as she turned her head away, she added: "Of course--there is nothing new--to her--"

"Except that my fight is waged from inside the Church--and your father's from outside. But that might make all the difference to her."

"I don't think so. It is"--she faltered--"the change itself. It is all so terrible to her."

"Any break with the old things? But doesn't it ever present itself to her--force itself upon her--as the upwelling of a new life?" he asked, sadly.

"Ah!--if it didn't in my father's case--"

The girl's eyes filled with tears.

But she quickly checked herself, and they moved on in silence. Meynell, with his pastoral instinct and training, longed to probe and soothe the trouble he divined in her. A great natural dignity in the girl--delicacy of feeling in the man--prevented it.

None the less her betrayal of emotion had altered their relation; or rather had carried it farther. For he had already seen her in contact with tragic and touching things. A day or two after that early morning when he had told the outlines of the Batesons' story to the two ladies who had entertained him at breakfast he had found her in Bateson's cottage with his wife. Bateson was dead, and his wife in that dumb, automaton state of grief when the human spirit grows poisonous to itself.

The young girl who came and went with so few words and such friendly timid ways had stirred, as it were, the dark air of the house with a breath of tenderness. She would sit beside the widow, sewing at a black dress, or helping her to choose the text to be printed on the funeral card; or she would come with her hands full of wild flowers, and coax Mrs. Bateson to go in the dusk to the churchyard with them. She had shown, indeed, wonderful inventiveness in filling the first week of loss and anguish with such small incident as might satisfy feeling, and yet take a woman out of herself.

The level sun shone full upon her as she walked beside him, and her face, her simple dress, her att.i.tude stole gradually like a spell on the mind of her companion. It was a remarkable face; the lower lip a little prominent, and the chin firmly rounded. But the smile, though rare, was youth and sweetness itself, and the dark eyes beneath the full ma.s.s of richly coloured hair were finely conscious and attentive--disinterested also; so that they won the spectator instead of embarra.s.sing him. She was very lightly and slenderly made, yet so as to convey an impression of strength and physical health. Meynell said to himself that there was something cloistered in her look, like one brought up in a grave atmosphere--an atmosphere of "recollection." At the same time nothing could be merrier--more childish even--than her laugh.

Their talk flowed on, from subject to subject, yet always tending, whether they would or no, toward the matter which was inevitably in both their minds. Insensibly the barrier between them and it broke away.

Neither, indeed, forgot the interposing shadow of Catharine Elsmere. But the conversation touched on ideas; and ideas, like fire in stubble, spread far afield. Oxford: the influences which had worked on Elsmere, before Meynell's own youth felt them; men, books, controversies, interwoven for Mary with her father's history, for Meynell with his own; these topics, in spite of misgivings on both sides, could not but reveal them to each other. The growing delight of their conversation was presently beyond Meynell's resisting. And in Mary, the freedom of it, no less than the sense of personal conflict and tragic possibilities that lay behind it, awakened the subtlest and deepest feelings. Poignant, concrete images rushed through her mind--a dying face to which her own had been lifted, as a tiny child; the hall of the New Brotherhood, where she sat sometimes beside her veiled mother; the sad n.o.bility of that mother's life; a score of trifling, heartpiercing things, that, to think of, brought the sob to her throat. Silent revolts of her own too, scattered along the course of her youth, revolts dumb, yet violent; longings for an "ampler ether"--for the great tumultuous clash of thought and doubt, of faith and denial, in a living and daring world. And yet again, times of pa.s.sionate remorse, in which all movement of revolt had died away; when her only wish had been to smooth the path of her mother, and to soften a misery she but dimly understood.

So that presently she was swept away--as by some released long-thwarted force. And under the pressure of her quick, searching sympathy his talk became insensibly more personal, more autobiographical. He was but little given to confession, but she compelled it. It was as though through his story she sought to understand her father's--to unveil many things yet dark to her.

Thus gradually, through ways direct and indirect, the intellectual story of the man revealed itself to the pure and sensitive mind of the girl.

She divined his home and upbringing--his father an Evangelical soldier of the old school, a home imbued with the Puritan and Biblical ideas. She understood something of the struggle provoked--after his ordination, in a somewhat late maturity--by the uprising of the typical modern problems, historical, critical, scientific. She pieced together much that only came out incidentally as to the counsellors within the Church to whom he had gone in his first urgent distress--the Bishop whom he reverenced--his old teachers at Oxford--the new lights at Cambridge.

And the card houses, the frail resting-places, thus built, it seemed, along the route, had lasted long; till at last a couple of small French books by a French priest and the sudden uprush of new life in the Roman Church had brought to the remote English clergyman at once the crystallization of doubt and the pa.s.sion of a freed faith.

"Modernism"--the attempt of the modern spirit, acting religiously, to refas.h.i.+on Christianity, not outside, but _inside_, the warm limits of the ancient churches--was born; and Richard Meynell became one of the first converts in England.

"Ah, if your father had but lived!" he said at last, turning upon her with emotion. "He died his n.o.ble death twenty years ago--think of the difference between then and now! Then the Broad Church movement was at an end. All that seemed so hopeful, so full of new life in the seventies, had apparently died down. Stanley, John Richard Green, Hugh Pearson were dead, Jowett was an old man of seventy; Liberalism within the Church hardly seemed to breathe; the judgment in the Voysey case--as much a defiance of modern knowledge as any Papal encyclical--though people had nearly forgotten it, had yet in truth brought the whole movement to a stand. All _within_ the gates seemed lost. Your father went out into the wilderness, and there, amid everything that was poor and mean and new, he laid down his life. But we!--we are no longer alone, or helpless. The tide has come up to the stranded s.h.i.+p--the launching of it depends now only on the faithfulness of those within it."

Mary was moved and silenced. The man's power, his transparent purity of heart, affected her, as they had already affected thousands. She was drawn to him also, unconsciously, by that something in personality which determines the relations of men and women. Yet there were deep instincts in her that protested. Girl as she was, she felt herself for the moment more alive than he to the dead weight of the World, fighting the tug of those who would fain move it from its ancient bases.

He seemed to guess at her thought; for he pa.s.sed on to describe the events by which, amid his own dumb or hidden struggle, he had become aware of the same forces working all round him; among the more intelligent and quick-witted miners, hungry for history and science, reading voraciously a Socialist and anti-Christian literature, yet all the while cheris.h.i.+ng deep at heart certain primitive superst.i.tions, and falling periodically into hot abysses of Revivalism, under the influence of Welsh preachers; or among the young men of the small middle cla.s.s, in whom a better education was beginning to awaken a number of new intellectual and religious wants; among women, too, sensitive, intelligent women--

"Ah! but," said Mary, quickly interrupting him, "don't imagine there are many women like Miss Puttenham! There are very, very few!"

He turned upon her with surprise.

"I was not thinking of Miss Puttenham, I a.s.sure you. She has taken very little part in this particular movement. I never know whether she is really with us. She stands outside the old things, but I can never make myself happy by the hope that I have been able to win her to the new!"

Mary looked puzzled--interrogative. But she checked her question, and drew him back instead to his narrative--to the small incidents and signs which had gradually revealed to him, among even his brother clergy, years before that date, the working of ideas and thoughts like his own. And now--

He broke off abruptly.

"You have heard of our meeting last week?"

"Of course!"

"There were men there from all parts of the diocese--and some from other counties. It made me think of what a French Catholic Modernist said to me two years ago--'Pius X may write encyclicals as he pleases--I could show him whole dioceses in France that are practically Modernist, where the Seminaries are Modernist, and two thirds of the clergy. The Bishop knows it quite well, and is helpless. Over the border perhaps you get an Ultramontane diocese, and an Ultramontane bishop. But the process goes on. Life and time are for _us_!'" He paused and laughed. "Ah, of course I don't pretend things are so here--yet. Our reforms in England--in Church and State--broaden slowly down. In France, reform, when it moves at all, tends to be catastrophic. But in the Markborough diocese alone we have won over perhaps a fifth of the clergy, and the dioceses all round are moving. As to the rapidity of the movement in the last few months it has been nothing short of amazing!"

"And what is the end to be? Not only--oh! Not only--_to destroy_!" said Mary. The soft intensity of the voice, the beauty of the look, touched him strangely.

He smiled, and there was a silence for a minute, as they wandered downward through a purple stretch of heather to a little stream, sun-smitten, that lay across their path. Once or twice she looked at him timidly, afraid lest she might have wounded him.

But at last he said:

"Shall I answer you in the words of a beloved poet?

"'What though there still need effort, strife?

Though much be still unwon?

Yet warm it mounts, the hour of life!

Death's frozen hour is done!

"'The world's great order dawns in sheen After long darkness rude, Divinelier imaged, clearer seen, With happier zeal pursued.

"'What still of strength is left, employ, _This_ end to help attain-- _One common wave of thought and joy Lifting mankind again_!'

"There"--his voice was low and rapid--"_there_ is the goal! a new _happiness_: to be reached through a new comrades.h.i.+p--a freer and yet intenser fellows.h.i.+p. We want to say to our fellowmen: 'Cease from groping among ruins!--from making life and faith depend upon whether Christ was born at Bethlehem or at Nazareth, whether He rose or did not rise, whether Luke or some one else wrote the Third Gospel, whether the Fourth Gospel is history or poetry. The life-giving force is _here_, and _now_!

It is burning in your life and mine--as it burnt in the life of Christ.

Give all you have to the flame of it--let it consume the chaff and purify the gold. Take the cup of cold water to the thirsty, heal the sick, tend the dying, and feel it thrill within you--the ineffable, the immortal life! Let the false miracle go!--the true has grown out of it, up from it, as the flower from the sheath.' Ah! but then"--he drew himself up unconsciously; his tone hardened--"we turn to the sons of tradition, and we say: 'We too must have our rights in what the past has built up, the past has bequeathed--as well as you! Not for you alone, the inst.i.tutions, the buildings, the arts, the traditions, that the Christ-life has so far fas.h.i.+oned for itself. They who made them are Our fathers no less than yours--give us our share in them!--we claim it! Give us our share in the cathedrals and churches of our country--our share in the beauty and majesty of our ancestral Christianity.' The men who led the rebellion against Rome in the sixteenth century claimed the _plant_ of English Catholicism. 'We are our fathers' sons, and these things are _ours!_'

they said, as they looked at Salisbury and Winchester. We say the same--with a difference. 'Give us the rights and the citizens.h.i.+p that belong to us! But do not imagine that we want to attack yours. In G.o.d's name, follow your own forms of faith--but allow us ours also--within the common shelter of the common Church. We are children of the same G.o.d--followers of the same Master. Who made you judges and dividers over us? You shall not drive us into the desert any more. A new movement of revolt has come--an hour of upheaval--and the men, with it!'"

Both stood motionless, gazing over the wide stretch of country--wood beyond wood, distance beyond distance, that lay between them and the Welsh border. Suddenly, as a shaft of light from the descending sun fled ghostlike across the plain, touching trees and fields and farms in its path, two n.o.ble towers emerged among the shadows--characters, as it were, that gave a meaning to the scroll of nature. They were the towers of Markborough Cathedral. Meynell pointed to them as he turned to his companion, his face still quivering under the strain of feeling.

"Take the omen! It is for _them_, in a sense--a spiritual sense--we are fighting. They belong not to any body of men that may chance to-day to call itself the English Church. They belong to _England_--in her aspect of faith--and to the English people!"

There was a silence. His look came back to her face, and the prophetic glow died from his own. "I should be very, very sorry"--he said anxiously--"if anything I have said had given you pain."

Mary shook her head.

"No--not to me. I--I have my own thoughts. But one must think--of others." Her voice trembled.

The words seemed to suggest everything that in her own personal history had stamped her with this sweet, shrinking look. Meynell was deeply touched. But he did not answer her, or pursue the conversation any farther. He gathered a great bunch of harebells for her, from the sun-warmed dells in the heather; and was soon making her laugh by his stories of colliery life and speech, _a propos_ of the colliery villages fringing the plain at their feet.

The stream, as they neared it, proved to be the boundary between the heath land and the pastures of the lower ground. It ran fresh and br.i.m.m.i.n.g between its rushy banks, shadowed here and there by a few light ashes and alders, but in general open to the sky, of which it was the mirror. It shone now golden and blue under the deepening light of the afternoon; and two or three hundred yards away Mary Elsmere distinguished two figures walking beside it--a young man apparently, and a girl.

Meynell looked at them absently.