"What secrets?"
"I found her--one day--with a picture--she was crying over. It--it was some one she had been in love with--I am certain it was--a handsome, dark man. And I _begged_ her to tell me--and she just got up and went away. So then I took my own line!"
Hester furiously dashed away the tears she had not been able to stop.
Meynell"s look changed. His voice grew strangely pitiful and soft.
"Dear Hester--if you knew--you couldn"t be unkind to Aunt Alice."
"Why shouldn"t I know? Why am I treated like a baby?"
"There are some things too bitter to tell,"--he said gravely--"some griefs we have no right to meddle with. But we can heal them--or make them worse. You"--his kind eyes scourged her again--"have been making everything worse for Aunt Alsie for a long time past."
Hester shrugged her shoulders pa.s.sionately, as though to repel the charge, but she said nothing. They moved on in silence for a little. In Meynell"s mind there reigned a medley of feelings--tragic recollections, moral questionings, which time had never silenced, perplexity as to the present and the future, and with it all, the liveliest and sorest pity for the young, childish, violent creature beside him. It was not for those who, with whatever motives, had contributed to bring her to that state and temper, to strike any note of harshness.
Presently, as they neared the end of the woody path, he looked up again.
He saw her sitting sullenly on the gently moving horse, a vision of beauty at bay. The sight determined him toward frankness.
"Hester!--I have told you that if you go on flirting with Philip Meryon you run the risk of disgrace and misery, because he has no conscience and no scruples, and you are ignorant and inexperienced, and have no idea of the fire you are playing with. But I think I had better go farther. I am going to say what you force me to say to you--young as you are. My strong belief is that Philip Meryon is either married already, or so entangled that he has no right to ask any decent woman to marry him. I have suspected it a long time. Now you force me to prove it."
Hester turned her head away.
"He told me I wasn"t to believe what you said about him!" she said in her most obstinate voice.
"Very well. Then I must set at once about proving it. The reasons which make me believe it are not for your ears." Then his tone changed--"Hester!--my child!--you can"t be in love with that fellow--that false, common fellow!--you can"t!"
Hester tightened her lips and would not answer. A rush of distress came over Meynell as he thought of her movement toward Philip in the garden.
He gently resumed:
"Any day now might bring the true lover, Hester!--the man who would comfort you for all the past, and show you what joy really means. Be patient, dear Hester--be patient! If you wanted to punish us for not making you happy enough, well, you have done it! But don"t plunge us all into despair--and take a little thought for your old guardian, who seems to have the world on his shoulders, and yet can"t sleep at nights, for worrying about his ward, who won"t believe a word he says, and sets all his wishes at defiance."
His manner expressed a playful and reproachful affection. Their eyes met.
Hester tried hard to maintain her antagonism, and he was well aware that he was but imperfectly able to gauge the conflict of forces in her mind.
He resumed his pleading with her--tenderly--urgently. And at last she gave way, at least apparently. She allowed him to lay a friendly hand on hers that held the reins, and she said with a long bitter breath:
"Oh, I know I"m a little beast!"
"My old-fashioned ideas don"t allow me to apply that epithet to young women! But if you"ll say "I want to be friends, Uncle Richard, and I won"t deceive you any more," why, then, you"ll make an old fellow happy! Will you?"
Slowly she let her cold fingers slip into his warm, protecting palm as he smiled upon her. She yielded to the dignity and charm of Meynell"s character as she had done a thousand times before; but in the proud, unhappy look she bent upon him there were new and disquieting things--prophecies of the coming womanhood, not to be unravelled. Meynell pressed her hand, and put it back upon the reins with a sigh he could not restrain.
He began to talk with a forced cheerfulness of their coming journey--of the French _milieu_ to which she was going. Hester answered in monosyllables, every now and then--he thought--choking back a sob. And again and again the discouraging thought struck through him--"Has this fellow touched her heart?"--so strong was the impression of an emerging soul and a developing personality.
Suddenly through the dispersing trees a light figure came hurriedly toward them. It was Alice Puttenham.
She was pale and weary, and when she saw Hester, with Meynell beside her, she gave a little cry. But Meynell, standing behind Hester, put his finger on his lips, and she controlled herself. Hester greeted her without any sign of emotion; and the three went homeward along the misty ways of the park. The sun had been swallowed up by rising fog; all colour had been sucked out of the leaves and the heather, even from the golden glades of fern. Only Hester"s hair, and her white dress as she pa.s.sed along, uplifted, made of her a kind of luminous wraith, and beside her, like the supports of an altar-piece, moved the two pensive figures of Meynell and Alice.
From a covert of thorn in the park, a youth who had retreated into its shelter on their approach watched them with malicious eyes. Another man was with him--a sheepish, red-faced person, who peered curiously at the little procession as it pa.s.sed about a hundred yards away.
"Quite a family party!" said Maurice Barron with a laugh.
In the late evening Meynell returned to the Rectory a wearied man, but with hours of occupation and correspondence still before him. He had left Hester with Alice Puttenham, in a state which Meynell interpreted as at once alarming and hopeful; alarming because it suggested that there might be an element of pa.s.sion in what had seemed to be a mere escapade dictated by vanity and temper; and hopeful because of the emotion the girl had once or twice betrayed, for the first time in the experience of any one connected with her. When they entered Alice Puttenham"s drawing-room, for instance--for Hester had stipulated she was not to be taken home--Alice had thrown her arms round her, and Hester had broken suddenly into crying, a thing unheard of. Meynell of course had hastily disappeared.
Since then the parish had taken its toll. Visits to two or three sick people had been paid. The Rector had looked in at the schools, where a children"s evening was going on, and had told the story of Aladdin with riotous success; he had taken off his coat to help in putting up decorations for an entertainment in the little Wesleyan meeting-house of corrugated iron; the parish nurse had waylaid him with reports, and he had dashed into the back parlour of a small embarra.s.sed tradesman, in mortal fear of collapse and bankruptcy, with the offer of a loan, sternly conditional upon facing the facts, and getting in an auditor. Lady Fox-Wilton of course had been seen, and the clamour of her most unattractive offspring allayed as much as possible. And now, emerging from this tangle of personal claims and small interests, in the silence and freedom of the night hours, Meynell was free to give himself once more to the intellectual and spiritual pa.s.sion of the Reform Movement.
His table was piled with unopened letters; on his desk lay a half-written article, and two or three foreign books, the latest products of the Modernist Movement abroad. His crowded be-littered room smiled upon him, as he shut its door upon the outer world. For within it, he lived more truly, more vividly, than anywhere else; and all the more since its threadbare carpet had been trodden by Mary Elsmere.
Yet as he settled himself by the fire with his pipe and his letters for half an hour"s ease before going to his desk, his thoughts were still full of Hester. The incurable optimism, the ready faith where his affections were concerned, which were such strong notes of his character, was busy persuading him that all would be well. At last, between them, they had made an impression on the poor child; and as for Philip, he should be dealt with this time with a proper disregard of either his own or his servants" lying. Hester was now to spend some months with a charming and cultivated French family. Plenty of occupation, plenty of amus.e.m.e.nt, plenty of appeal to her intelligence. Then, perhaps, travel for a couple of years, with Aunt Alice--as much separation as possible, anyway, from the Northleigh family and house. Alice was not rich, but she could manage as much as that, if he advised it, and he would advise it.
Then with her twenty-first year, if Stephen or any other wooer were to the fore, the crisis must be faced, and the child must know! and it would be a cold-blooded lover that would weigh her story against her face.
Comfort himself as he would, however, dream as he would, Meynell"s conscience was always sore for Hester. Had they done right?--or hideously wrong? Had not all their devices been a mere trifling with nature--a mere attempt to "bind the courses of Orion," with the inevitable result in Hester"s unhappy childhood and perverse youth?
The Rector as he pulled at his pipe could still feel the fluttering of her slender hand in his. The recollection stirred in him again all the intolerable pity, the tragic horror of the past. Poor, poor little girl.
But she should be happy yet, "with rings on her fingers," and everything proper!
Then from this fatherly and tender preoccupation he pa.s.sed into a more intimate and poignant dreaming. Mary!--in the moonlight, under the autumn trees, was the vision that held him; varied sometimes by the dream of her in that very room, sitting ghostly in the chair beside him, her lovely eyes wandering over its confusion of books and papers. He thought of her exquisite neatness of dress and delicacy of movement, and smiled happily to himself. "How she must have wanted to tidy up!" And he dared to think of a day when she would come and take possession of him altogether--books, body and soul, and gently order his life....
"Why, you rascals!"--he said, jealously, to the dogs--"she fed you--I know she did--she patted and pampered you, eh, didn"t she? She likes dogs--you may thank your lucky stars she does!"
But they only raised their eager heads, and turned their loving eyes upon him, prepared to let loose pandemonium as soon as he showed signs of moving.
"Well, you don"t expect me to take you out for a walk at ten o"clock at night, do you?--idiots!" he hurled at them reprovingly; and after another moment of bright-eyed interrogation, disappointment descended, and down went their noses on their paws again.
His trust in the tender steadfastness of Mary"s character made itself powerfully felt in these solitary moments. She knew that while these strenuous days were on he could allow himself no personal aims. But the growing knowledge that he was approved by a soul so pure and so devout had both strung up all his powers and calmed the fevers of battle. He loved his cause the more because it was ever more clear to him that she pa.s.sionately loved it too. And sensitive and depressed as he often was--the penalty of the optimist--her faith in him had doubled his faith in himself.
There was a singular pleasure also in the link his love for her had forged between himself and Elsmere--the dead leader of an earlier generation. "Lat.i.tudinarianism is coming in upon us like a flood!"--cried the _Church Times_, wringing its hands. In other words, thought Meynell, "a New Learning is at last penetrating the minds and consciences of men--in the Church, no less than out of it." And Elsmere had been one of its martyrs. Meynell thought with emotion of the emaciated form he had last seen in the thronged hall of the New Brotherhood. "_Our_ venture is possible--because _you_ suffered," he would say to himself, addressing not so much Elsmere, as Elsmere"s generation, remembering its struggles, its thwarted hopes, and starved lives.
And Elsmere"s wife?--that rigid, pathetic figure, who, before he knew her in the flesh, had been to him, through the reports of many friends, a kind of legendary presence--the embodiment of the Old Faith. Meynell only knew that as far as he was concerned something had happened--something which he could not define. She was no longer his enemy; and he blessed her humbly in his heart. He thought also, with a curious thankfulness, of her strong and immovable convictions. Each thinking mind, as it were, carries within it its own Pageant of the Universe, and lights the show with its own pa.s.sion. Not to quench the existing light in any human breast--but to kindle and quicken where no light is: to bring forever new lamp-bearers into the Lampadephoria of life, and marshal them there in their places, on equal terms with the old, neither excluded, nor excluding: this, surely this was the ideal of Modernism.
Elsmere"s widow might never admit his own claim to equal rights within the Christian society. What matter! It seemed to him that in some mysterious way she had now recognized the spiritual necessity laid upon him to fight for that claim; had admitted him, so to speak, to the rights of a belligerent. And that had made all the difference.
He did not know how it had happened. But he was strangely certain that it had happened.
But soon the short interval of rest and dream he had allowed himself was over. He turned to his writing-table.
What a medley of letters! Here was one from a clergyman in the Midlands:
"We introduced the new Liturgy last Sunday, and I cannot describe the emotion, the stirring of all the dead-bones it has brought about. There has been of course a secession; but the church at Patten End amply provides for the seceders, and among our own people one seems to realize at last something of what the simplicity and sincerity of the first Christian feeling must have been! No "allowances" to make for scandalous mistranslations and misquotations--no foolish legends, or unedifying tales of barbarous people--no cursing psalms--no old Semitic nonsense about G.o.d resting on the seventh day, delivered in the solemn sing-song which makes it not only nonsense but hypocrisy....
"I have held both a marriage and a funeral this week under the new service-book. I think that all persons accustomed to think of what they are saying felt the strangest delight and relief in the disappearance of the old marriage service. It was like the dropping of a weight to which our shoulders had become so accustomed that we hardly realized it till it was gone. Instead of pompous and futile absurdity--as in the existing exhortation, and homily--beautiful and fitting quotation from the unused treasures of the Bible. Instead of the brutal speech, the crudely physical outlook of an earlier day, the just reticence and n.o.bler perceptions of our own, combined with perfectly plain and tender statement as to the founding of the home and the family. Instead of besmirching bits of primitive and ugly legend like the solemn introduction of Adam"s rib into the prayers, a few new prayers of great beauty--some day you must tell me who wrote them, for I suppose you know?
(and, by the way, why should we not write as good prayers, to-day, as in any age of the Christian Church?). Instead of the old "obey," for the woman, which has had such a definitely debasing effect, as I believe, on the position of women, especially in the working cla.s.ses--a formula, only slightly altered, but the same for the man and the woman....
"In short, a seemly, and beautiful, and moving thing, instead of a ceremony which in spite of its few fine, even majestic, elements, had become an offence and a scandal. All the fine elements have been kept, and only the scandal amended. Why was it not done long ago?
"Then as to the burial service. The Corinthian chapter stripped of its arguments which are dead, and confined to its cries of poetry and faith which are immortal, made a new and thrilling impression. I confess I thought I should have broken my heart over the omission of "I know that my Redeemer liveth"--and yet now that it is gone, there is a sense of moral exhilaration in having let it go! One knew all the time that whoever wrote the poem of Job neither said what he was made to say in the famous pa.s.sage, nor meant what he was supposed to mean. One was perfectly aware, from one"s Oxford days, as the choir chanted the great words, that they were a flagrant mistranslation of a corrupt and probably interpolated pa.s.sage. And yet the glory of Handel"s music, the glamour of a.s.sociation overcame one. But now that it is cut ruthlessly away from those moments in life when man can least afford any make-believe with himself or his fellows--now that music alone declaims and fathers it--there is the strangest relief! One feels, as I have said, the joy that comes from something difficult and righteous _done_--in spite of everything!