"Oh, Maurice had various old scores to settle with me," said Meynell, quietly. "I have come across him more than once in this parish--no need to say how. I tried to prevent him from publicly disgracing himself and you; and I did prevent him. He saw in this business an easy revenge on a sanctimonious parson who had interfered with his pleasures."
Barron had risen and was pacing the room with unsteady steps. Meynell still watched him, with the same glitter in the eye. Meynell"s whole nature indeed, at the moment, had gathered itself into one avenging force; he was at once sword and smiter. The man before him seemed to him embodied cruelty and hypocrisy; he felt neither pity nor compunction. And presently he said abruptly--
"But I am afraid I have much more serious matter to lay before you than this business of the letters."
"What do you mean?"
Taking another letter from his pocket, Meynell glanced at it a moment, and then handed it to Barron. Barron was for an instant inclined to refuse it, as he had refused the others. But Meynell insisted.
"Believe me, you had better read it. It is a letter from Mr. Flaxman to myself, and it concerns a grave charge against your son. I bring you a chance of saving him from prosecution; but there is no time to be lost."
Barron took the letter, carried it to the window, and stood reading it.
Meynell sat on the other side of the room watching him, still in the same impa.s.sive "possessed" state.
Suddenly, Barron put his hand over his face, and a groan he could not repress broke from him. He turned his back and stood bending over the letter.
At the same instant a shiver ran through Meynell, like the return to life of some arrested energy, some paralyzed power. The shock of that sound of suffering had found him iron; it left him flesh. The spiritual habit of a lifetime revived; for "what we do we are."
He rose slowly, and went over to the window.
"You can still save him--from the immediate consequences of this at least--if you will. I have arranged that with Flaxman. It was my seeing him enter the room alone where the coins were, the night of the party, that first led to the idea that he might have taken them. Then, as you see, certain dealers" shops were watched by a private detective. Maurice appeared--sold the Hermes coin--was traced to his lodgings and identified. So far the thing has not gone beyond private inquiry; for the dealer will do what Flaxman wants him to do. But Maurice still has the more famous of the two coins; and if he attempts to sell that, after the notices to the police, there may be an exposure any day. You must go up to London as soon as you can--"
"I will go to-night," said Barron, in a tone scarcely to be heard. He stood with his hands on his sides, staring out upon the wintry garden outside, just as a gardener"s boy laden with holly and ivy for the customary Christmas decorations of the house was pa.s.sing across the lawn.
There was silence a little. Meynell walked slowly up and down the room.
At last Barron turned toward him; the very incapacity of the plump and ruddy face for any tragic expression made it the more tragic.
"I propose to write to the Bishop at once. Do you desire a public statement?"
"There must be a public statement," said Meynell gravely. "The thing has gone too far. Flaxman and I have drawn one up. Will you look at it?"
Barron took it, and went to his writing-table.
"Wait a moment!" said Meynell, following him, and laying his hand on the open page. "I don"t want you to sign that by _force majeure_. Dismiss--if you can--any thought of any hold I may have upon you, because of Maurice"s misdoing. You and I, Barron, have known each other some years.
We were once friends. I ask you--not under any threat--not under any compulsion--to accept my word as an honest man that I am absolutely innocent of the charge you have brought against me."
Barron, who was sitting before his writing-table, buried his face in his hands a moment, then raised it.
"I accept it," he said, almost inaudibly.
"You believe me?"
"I believe you."
Meynell drew a long breath. Then he added, with a first sign of emotion--"And I may also count upon your doing henceforth what you can to protect that poor lady, Miss Puttenham, and her kinsfolk, from the consequences of this long persecution?"
Barron made a sign of a.s.sent. Meynell left him to read and sign the public apology and retraction, which Flaxman had mainly drawn up; while the Rector himself took up a Bradshaw lying on the table, and walked to the window to consult it.
"You will catch the 1.40," he said, as Barron rose from the writing-table. "Let me advise you to get him out of the country for a time."
Barron said nothing. He came heavily toward the window, and the two men stood looking at each other, overtaken both of them by a mounting wave of consciousness. The events, pa.s.sions, emotions of the preceding months pressed into memory, and beat against the silence. But it was Meynell who turned pale.
"What a pity--to spoil the fight!" he said in a low voice. "It would have been splendid--to fight it--fair."
"I shall of course withdraw my name from the Arches suit," said Barron, leaning over a chair, his eyes on the ground.
Meynell did not reply. He took up his hat; only saying as he went toward the door:
"Remember--Flaxman holds his hand entirely. The situation is with you."
Then, after a moment"s hesitation, he added simply, almost shyly--"G.o.d help you! Won"t you consult your daughter?"
Barron made no answer. The door opened and shut.
BOOK IV
MEYNELL AND MARY
".... but Life ere long Came on me in the public ways and bent Eyes deeper than of old; Death met I too, And saw the dawn glow through."
CHAPTER XX
A mild January day on the terrace of St. Germains. After a morning of h.o.a.r-frost the sun was shining brightly on the terrace, and on the panorama it commands. A pleasant light lay on the charming houses that front the skirts of the forest, on the blue-gray windings of the Seine, on the groves of leafless poplars interwoven with its course, on the plain with its thickly sown villages, on the height of Mont Valerien, behind which lay Paris. In spite of the sunshine, however, it was winter, and there was no movement in St. Germains. The terrace and the road leading from it to the town were deserted; and it was easy to see from the aspect of the famous hotel at the corner of the terrace that, although not closed, it despaired of visitors. Only a trio of French officers in the far distance of the terrace, and a white-capped _bonne_ struggling against the light wind with a basket on her arm, offered any sign of life to the observant eyes of a young man who was briskly pacing up and down that section of the terrace which abuts on the hotel.
The young man was Philip Meryon. His dark tweed suit and fur waistcoat disclosed a figure once singularly agile and slender, on which self-indulgence was now beginning to tell. Nevertheless, as the _bonne_ pa.s.sed him she duly noted and admired his pictorial good looks, opining at the same time that he was not French. Why was he there? She decided in her own mind that he was there for an a.s.signation, by which she meant, of course, a meeting with a married woman; and she smiled the incorrigible French smile.
a.s.signation or no, she would have seen, had she looked closer, that the young man in question was in no merely beatific or expectant frame of mind. Meryon"s look was a look both of excitement--as of one under the influence of some news of a startling kind--and of anxiety.
Would she come? And if she came would he be able to bring and hold her to any decision, without--without doing what even he shrank from doing?
For that ill chance in a thousand which Meynell had foreseen, and hoped, as mortals do, to baffle, had come to pa.s.s. That morning, a careless letter enclosing the payment of a debt, and written by a young actor, who had formed part of one of the bohemian parties at the Abbey, during the summer, and had now been playing for a week in the Markborough theatre, had given Meryon the clue to the many vague conjectures or perplexities which had already crossed his mind with regard to Hester"s origin and history.
"Your sanctified cousin, Richard Meynell" [wrote the young man] "seems after all to be made of the common clay. There are strange stories going the round about him here; especially in a crop of anonymous letters of which the author can"t be found. I send you a local newspaper which has dared to print one of them with dashes for the names. The landlord of the inn told me how to fill them up, and you will see I have done it. The beauteous maiden herself has vanished from the scene--as no doubt you know. Indeed you probably know all about it. However, as you are abroad, and not likely to see these local rags, and as no London paper will print these things, you may perhaps be interested in what I enclose. Alack, my dear Philip, for the saints! They seem not so very different from you and me."