"Oh, my dear friend, I am grateful for all you tell me of the changed situation at Markborough. But after all the thing is done--there can be no undoing it. The lies mingled with the truth have been put down.
Perhaps people are ready now to let the truth itself slip back with the lies into the darkness. But how can we--Edith and I--and Hester--ever live the old life again? The old shelter, the old peace, are gone. We are wanderers and pilgrims henceforward!
"As far as I know, Hester is still in complete ignorance of all that has happened. I have told her that Edith finds Tours so economical that she prefers to stay abroad for a couple of years, and to let the Upcote house. And I have said also that when she herself is tired of Paris, I am ready to take her to Germany, and then to Italy. She laughed, as though I had said something ridiculous! One never knows her real mind.
But at least I see no sign of any suspicion in her; and I am sure that she has seen no English newspaper that could have given her a clue. As to Philip Meryon, as I have told you before, I often feel a vague uneasiness; but watch as I will, I can find nothing to justify it. Oh!
Richard, my heart is broken for her. A little love from her, and the whole world would change for me. But even what I once possessed these last few months seem to have taken from me!"
"The thing is done!--there can be no undoing it." That was the sore burden of all Meynell"s thoughts, awakening in him, at times, the "bitter craving to strike heavy blows" at he knew not what. What, indeed, could ever undo the indecency, the cruelty, the ugly revelations of these three months? The grossness of the common public, the weakness of friends, the solemn follies to which men are driven by hate or bigotry: these things might well have roused the angry laughter that lives in all quick and honest souls. But the satiric mood, when it appeared, soon vanished. He remembered the saying of Meredith concerning the spectacle of Bossuet over the dead body of Moliere--"at which the dark angels may, but men do not, laugh."
This bitterness might have festered within him, but for the blessedness of Mary Elsmere"s letters. She had seen the apology; she knew nothing of its causes. But she betrayed a joy that was almost too proud to know itself as joy; since what doubt could there ever have been but that right and n.o.bleness would prevail? Catharine wrote the warmest and kindest of letters. But Mary"s every word was balm, just because she knew nothing, and wrote out of the fulness of her mere faith in him, ready to let her trust take any shape he would. And though she knew nothing, she seemed by some divine instinct to understand also the pain that overshadowed the triumph; to be ready to sit silent with him before the irreparable. Day by day, as he read these letters, his heart burned within him; and Rose noted the growing restlessness. But he had heavy arrears of parish business upon him, of correspondence, of literary work. He struggled on, the powers of mind and body flagging, till one night, when he had been nearly a week at Maudeley, Rose came to him one evening, and said with a smile that had in it just a touch of sweet mockery--
"My dear friend, you are doing no good here at all! Go and see Mary!"
He turned upon her, amazed.
"She has not sent for me."
Rose laughed out.
"Did you expect her to be as modern as that?"
He murmured--
"I have been waiting for a word."
"What right had you to wait? Go and get it out of her! Where will you stay?"
He gasped.
"There is the farm at the head of the valley."
"Telegraph to-night."
He thought a little--the colour flooding into his face. And then he quietly went to Rose"s writing-table, and wrote his telegram.
CHAPTER XXI
But before he took the midday train from Markborough to the North, on the following day, Meynell spent half an hour with his Bishop in the episcopal library.
It was a strange meeting. When Bishop Craye first caught sight of the entering figure, he hurried forward, and as the door closed upon the footman, he seized Meynell"s hand in both his own.
"I see what you have gone through," he said, with emotion; "and you would not let me help you!"
Meynell smiled faintly.
"I knew you wished to help me--but--"
Then his voice dropped, and the Bishop would not have pressed him for the world. They fell upon the anonymous letters, a comparatively safe topic, and the relation of Barron to them. Naturally Meynell gave the Bishop no hint whatever of the graver matter which had finally compelled Barron"s surrender. He described his comparison of the Dawes letters with "a doc.u.ment in the young man"s handwriting which I happened to have in my possession," and the gradual but certain conviction it had brought about.
"I was extraordinarily blind, however, not to find the clue earlier."
"It is not only you, my dear Meynell, that need regret it!" cried the Bishop. "I hope you have sometimes given a thought to the men on our side compelled to see the fight waged--"
"With such a weapon? I knew very well that no one under your influence, my lord, would touch it," said Meynell simply.
The Bishop observed him, and with an inner sympathy, one might almost say a profound and affectionate admiration, which contrasted curiously with the public position in which they stood to each other. It was now very generally recognized, and especially in Markborough and its diocese, that Meynell had borne himself with extraordinary dignity and patience under the ordeal through which he had pa.s.sed. And the Bishop--whose guess had so nearly hit the truth, who had been persuaded that in the whole matter Meynell was but the victim of some trust, some duty, which honour and conscience would not let him betray in order to save himself--the Bishop was but the more poignantly of this opinion now that he had the man before him. The weeks of suffering, the long storm of detraction, had left their mark; and it was not a light one. The high-hearted little Bishop felt himself in some way guilty, obscurely and representatively, if not directly.
Yet, at the same time, when the personal matter dropped away, and they pa.s.sed, as they soon did, to a perfectly calm discussion of the action in the Court of Arches which was to begin within a week, nothing could be clearer or more irrevocable than the differences, ecclesiastical and intellectual, which divided these two men, who in matters of personal feeling were so sensitively responsive the one to the other.
Meynell dwelt on the points of law raised in the pleadings, on the bearing of previous cases--the _Essays and Reviews_ case above all--upon the suit. The antecedents of the counsel employed on both sides, the idiosyncrasies of the judge, the probable length of the trial; their talk ranged round these matters, without ever striking deeper. It was a.s.sumed between them that the expulsion of the Modernist clergy was only a question of months--possibly weeks. Once indeed Meynell referred slightly to the agitation in the country, to the growing s...o...b..ll of the pet.i.tion to Parliament, to the now certain introduction of a Bill "To promote an amended const.i.tution for the Church of England." The Bishop"s eyebrows went up, his lip twitched. It was the scorn of a spiritual aristocracy threatened by the populace.
But in general they talked with extraordinary frankness and mutual good feeling; and they grasped hands more than cordially at the end. They might have been two generals, meeting before a battle, under the white flag.
Still the same mild January weather; with unseasonable shoots putting forth, and forebodings on the part of all garden-lovers, as fresh and resentful as though such forebodings, with their fulfilments, were not the natural portion of all English gardeners.
In the Westmoreland dales, the month was rainier than elsewhere, but if possible, milder. Yellow buds were already foolishly breaking on the gorse, and weak primroses, as though afraid to venture, and yet venturing, were to be found in the depths of many woods.
Meynell had slept at Whindale. In the morning a trap conveyed him and his bag to the farmhouse at the head of the valley; and the winter sun had only just scattered the mists from the dale when, stick in hand, he found himself on the road to Mrs. Elsmere"s little house, Burwood.
With every step his jaded spirits rose. He was a pa.s.sionate lover of mountains, with that modern spirit which finds in them man"s best refuge from modernness. The damp fragrance of the mossy banks and bare hedges; the racing freshness of the stream, and the little eddies of foam blown from it by the wind; the small gray sheep in the fields; the crags overhead dyed deep in withered heather; the stone farmhouses with their touch of cheerful white on door and window; all the exquisite detail of gra.s.s, and twig and stone; and overhead the slowly pa.s.sing clouds in the wide sweep of the dale--these things to him were spiritual revival, they dressed and prepared him for that great hour to which dimly, yet through all his pulses, he felt he was going.
The little house sent up a straight column of blue smoke into the quiet air. Its upper windows were open; the sun was on its lichened porch, and on the silver stem of the birch tree which rose from the mossy gra.s.s beside it.
He did not need to knock. Mary was in the open doorway, her face all light and rose colour; and in the shadows of the pa.s.sage behind her stood Catharine. When with the touch of Mary"s hand still warm in his, Meynell turned to greet her mother, he was seized, even through the quiet emotion which held them all, by an impression of change. Some energy of physical life had faded from the worn n.o.bility of Catharine"s face, instead a "grave heavenliness" which disquieted the spectator, beautiful as it was.
But the momentary shock was lost in the quiet warmth of her greeting.
"You are going to take her for a walk?" she asked wistfully, as Mary left them alone in the little sitting-room.
"You allow it?" said Meynell, hardly knowing what he said, and still retaining her hand.
Catharine smiled.
"Mary is her own mistress." Then she added, with a deep, involuntary sigh: "Whatever she says to you, she knows she has her mother"s blessing."
Meynell stooped and kissed her hand.
A few minutes later, he and Mary had taken the road along the dale.
Catharine stood under the little porch to look after them. Mingled sweetness and bitterness filled her mind. She pictured to herself for an instant what it would have been if she had been giving Mary to a Christian pastor of the stamp of her own father, "sound in the faith," a "believer," entering upon what had always seemed to her from her childhood the ideal and exalted life of the Christian ministry. As things were, in a few weeks, Richard Meynell would be an exile and a wanderer, chief among a regiment of banished men, driven out by force from the National Church; without any of the dignity--that dignity which had been her husband"s--of voluntary renunciation. And Mary would become his wife only to share in his rebellion, his defiance, and his exile.
She crossed her hands tightly upon her breast as though she were imprinting these sad facts upon her consciousness, learning to face them, to bear them with patience. And yet--in some surprising way--they did not hurt her as sharply as they would once have done. Trembling--almost in terror--she asked herself whether her own faith was weakening. And amid the intensity of aspiration and love with which her mind threw itself on the doubt, she turned back, tottering a little, to her chair by the fire.
She was glad to be alone, pa.s.sionately as she loved her Mary. And as she sat now following Meynell and Mary in thought along the valley, and now listening vaguely to the murmur of the fire or the stream outside, there came upon her a first gentle premonition--as though a whisper, from far away--of the solitude of death.