"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 pet.i.tion 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 const.i.tuents. Such a heat of religious feeling, such a pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.s. 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 G.o.d--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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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 inc.u.mbent. 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 pa.s.sion, 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 G.o.d they could adore.
The week pa.s.sed, 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 gla.s.s, 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 impa.s.sioned prayer, and then sat down to listen. Through the fast darkening church, chanted by half the choir, there stole those words of n.o.blest 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: