Meanwhile, for Catharine Elsmere and Mary these days of early autumn were
passing in a profound external quiet which bore but small relation to the
mental history of mother and daughter.
The tranquillity indeed of the little water-locked cottage was complete.
Mrs. Flaxman at the big house took all the social brunt upon herself. She
set no limit to her own calls, or to her readiness to be called upon. The
Flaxman dinner and tennis parties were soon an institution in the
neighbourhood; and the distinguished persons who gathered at Maudeley for
the Flaxman week-ends shed a reflected lustre on Upcote itself. But Rose
Flaxman stoutly protected her widowed sister. Mrs. Elsmere was delicate
and in need of rest; she was not to be expected to take part in any
social junketings, and callers were quite plainly warned off.
For all of which Catharine Elsmere was grateful to a younger sister,
grotesquely unlike herself in temperament and character, yet brought
steadily closer to her by the mere passage of life. Rose was an artist
and an optimist. In her youth she had been an eager and exquisite
musician; in her middle life she was a loving and a happy woman, though
she too had known a tragic moment in her first youth. Catharine, her
elder by some years, still maintained, beneath an exquisite refinement,
the strong north-country characteristics of the Westmoreland family to
which the sisters belonged. Her father had been an Evangelical scholar
and headmaster; the one slip of learning in a rude and primitive race.
She had been trained by him; and in spite of her seven years of married
life beside a nature so plastic and sensitive as Elsmere's, and of her
passionate love for her husband, it was the early influences on her
character which had in the end proved the more enduring.
For years past she had spent herself in missionary work for the Church,
in London; and though for Robert's sake she had maintained for long a
slender connection that no one misunderstood with the New Brotherhood,
the slow effect of his withdrawal from her life made itself inevitably
felt. She stiffened and narrowed intellectually; while for all sinners
and sufferers, within the lines of sympathy she gradually traced out
for herself, she would have willingly given her body to be burned, so
strong was the Franciscan thirst in her for the self-effacement and
self-sacrifice that belong to the Christian ideal, carried to intensity.
So long as Mary was a child, her claim upon her mother had to some extent
balanced the claims of what many might have thought a devastating and
depersonalizing charity. Catharine was a tender though an austere mother;
she became and deserved to become the idol of her daughter. But as Mary
grew up she was drawn inevitably into her mother's activities; and
Catharine, in the blindness of her ascetic faith, might have injured the
whole spring of the girl's youth by the tremendous strain thus put upon
it by affection on the one hand and pity on the other.
Mercifully, perhaps, for them both, Catharine's nerve and strength
suddenly gave way; and with them that abnormal exaltation and clearness
of spiritual vision which had carried her through many sorrowing years.
She entered upon a barren and darkened path; the Christian joy deserted
her, and there were hours and days when little more than the Christian
terrors remained. It was her perception of this which roused such a
tender and desperate pity in Mary. Her mother's state fell short indeed
of religious melancholy; but for a time it came within sight of it.
Catharine dreaded to be found herself a castaway; and the memory of
Robert's denials of the faith--magnified by her mental state, like trees
in mist--had now become an ever-haunting misery which tortured her
unspeakably. Her mind was possessed by the parables of judgment--the
dividing of the sheep from the goats, the shutting of the door of
salvation on those who had refused the heavenly offers, and by all those
sayings of the early Church that make "faith" the only passport to
eternal safety.
Her saner mind struggled in vain against what was partly a physical
penalty for defied physical law. And Mary also, her devoted companion,
whose life depended hour by hour on the aspects and changes of her
mother, must needs be drawn within the shadow of Catharine's dumb and
phantom-ridden pain. The pain itself was dumb, because it concerned the
deepest feelings of a sternly reserved woman. But mingled with the pain
were other matters--resentments, antagonisms--the expression of which
often half consciously relieved it. She rose in rebellion against those
sceptical and deadly forces of the modern world which had swept her
beloved from the narrow way. She fled them for herself; she feared them
for Mary, in whom she had very early divined the working of Robert's
aptitudes and powers.
And now--by ill-fortune--a tired and suffering woman had no sooner found
refuge and rest in the solitude of Forkéd Pond than, thanks partly to the
Flaxmans' new friendship for Upcote's revolutionary parson, and partly to
all the public signs, not to be escaped, of the commotion brewing in the
diocese, and in England generally, the same agitations, the same troubles
which had destroyed her happiness and peace of mind in the past, came
clattering about her again.
Every one talked of them; every one took a passionate concern in them;
the newspapers were full of them. The personality of Meynell, or that of
the Bishop; the characters and motives of his opponents; the chances of
the struggle--and the points on which it turned; even in the little
solitary house between the waters Catharine could not escape them. The
Bishop, too, was an old friend; before his promotion he had been the
incumbent of a London parish in which Catharine had worked. She was no
sooner settled at Forkéd Pond than he came to see her; and what more
natural than he should speak of the anxieties weighing upon him to one so
able to feel for them?
Then!--the first involuntary signs of Mary's interest in, Mary's sympathy
with, the offender! In Catharine's mind a thousand latent terrors sprang
at once to life. For a time--some weeks--she had succeeded in checking
all developments. Invitations were refused; meetings were avoided. But
gradually the situation changed. Points of contact began inevitably to
multiply between Mary and the disturber of Christ's peace in Upcote.
Mary's growing friendship for Alice Puttenham, her chance encounters with
Meynell there, or in the village, or in the Flaxmans' drawing-room, were
all distasteful and unwelcome to Catharine Elsmere. At least her Robert
had sacrificed himself--had done the honest and honourable thing. But
this man--wounding the Church from within--using the opportunities of the
Church for the destruction of the Church--who would make excuses for such
a combatant?
And the more keenly she became aware of the widening gulf between her
thoughts and Mary's--of Mary's involuntary, instinctive sympathy with the
enemy--the greater was her alarm.
For the first time in all her strenuous, self-devoted life she would
sometimes make much of her physical weakness in these summer days, so as
to keep Mary with her, to prevent her from becoming more closely
acquainted with Meynell and Meynell's ideas. And in fact this new anxiety
interfered with her recovery; she had only to let herself be ill, and ill
most genuinely she was.
Mary understood it all, and submitted. Her mother's fears were indeed
amply justified! Mary's secret mind was becoming absorbed, from a
distance, in Meynell's campaign; Meynell's personality, through all
hindrance and difficulty--nay, perhaps, because of them--was gradually
seizing upon and mastering her own; and processes of thought that, so
long as she and her mother were, so to speak, alone in the world
together, were still immature and potential, grew apace. The woods and
glades of Maudeley, the village street, the field paths, began to be for
her places of magic, whence at any moment might spring flowers of joy
known to her alone. To see him pass at a distance, to come across him in
a miner's cottage, or in Miss Puttenham's drawing-room--these rare
occasions were to her the events of the summer weeks. Nevertheless, when
September arrived, she had long since forbidden herself to hope for
anything more.
Meanwhile, Rose Flaxman was the only person who ever ventured to feel and
show the irritation of the natural woman toward her sister's
idiosyncrasies.
"Do for heaven's sake stop her reading these books!" she said impatiently
one evening to Mary, when she had taken leave of Catharine, and her niece
was strolling back with her toward Maudeley.
"What books?"
"Why, lives of bishops and deans and that kind of thing! I never come but
I find a pile of them beside her. It should be made absolutely illegal to
write the life of a clergyman! My dear, your mother would be well in a
week if we could only stop it and put her on a course of Gaboriau!"
Mary smiled rather sadly.
"They seem to be the only things that interest her now."
"What, the deans? I know. It's intolerable. She went to speak to the
postman just now while I was with her, and I looked at the book she had
been reading with her mark in it. I should like to have thrown it into
the pond! Some tiresome canon or other writing to a friend about Eternal
Punishment. What does he know about it? I should like to ask! I declare I
hope he may know something more about it some day! There was your mother
as white as her ruffles, with dark lines under her eyes. I tell you
clerical intimidation should be made a punishable offence. It's just as
bad as any other!"
Mary let her run on. She moved silently along the grassy path, her pretty
head bent, her hands clasped behind her. And presently her aunt resumed:
"And the strange thing is, my dear, saving your presence--that your
beloved mother is quite lax in some directions, while she is so strict in
others. I never can make her pay the smallest attention to the things I
tell her about Philip Meryon, for instance, that Hugh tells me. 'Poor
fellow!' she always calls him, as though his abominable ways were like
the measles--something you couldn't help. And as for that wild minx
Hester!--she has positively taken a fancy to her. It reminds me of what
an old priest said to me once in Rome--'Sins, madame!--the only sins that
matter are those of the intellect!' There!--send me off--before I say any
more _inconvenances_!"
Mary waved farewell to her vivacious aunt, and walked slowly back to the
cottage. She was conscious of inner smart and pain; conscious also for
the first time of a critical mind toward the mother whose will had been
the law of her life. It was not that she claimed anything for herself;
but she claimed justice for a man misread.
"If they could only know each other!"--she found herself saying at last
aloud--with an impetuous energy; and then, with a swift return upon
herself--"Mother, _darling_!--mother, who has no one in the world--but
me!"
As the words escaped her, she came in sight of the cottage, and saw that
her mother was sitting in her usual place beside the water. Catharine's
hands were resting on a newspaper they had evidently just put down, and
she was gazing absently across the lights and shadows, the limpid blues
and browns of the tree-locked pool before her.
Mary came to sit on the grass beside her.
"Have you been reading, dearest?"
But as she spoke she saw, with discomfort, that the newspaper on her
mother's knee was the _Church Guardian_, in which a lively correspondence
on the subject of Meynell and the Modernist Movement generally was at the
moment proceeding.
"Yes, I have been reading," said Catharine slowly--"and I have been very
sad."
"Then I wish you wouldn't read!" cried Mary, kissing her hand. "I should
like to burn all the newspapers!"
"What good would that do?" said Catharine, trying to smile. "I have been
reading Bishop Craye's letter to the _Guardian_. Poor Bishop!--what a
cruel, cruel position!"
The words were spoken with a subdued but passionate energy, and when Mrs.
Elsmere perceived that Mary made no reply, her hand slipped out of her
daughter's.
There was silence for a little, broken by Catharine, speaking with the
same quiet vehemence:
"I cannot understand how you, Mary, or any one else can defend what this
man--Mr. Meynell--is doing. If he cannot agree with the Church, let him
leave it. But to stay in it--giving this scandal--and this offence--"
Her voice failed her. Mary collected her thoughts as best she could.
At last she said, with difficulty:
"Aren't you thinking only of the people who may be hurt--or scandalized?
But after all, there they are in the Church, with all its privileges and
opportunities--with everything they want. They are not asked to give
anything up--nobody thinks of interfering with them--they have all the
old dear things, the faiths and the practices they love--and that help
_them_. They are only asked to tolerate other people who want different
things. Mr. Meynell stands--I suppose--for the people--who are starved,
whose souls wither, or die, for lack of the only food that could nourish
them."
"'I am the bread of life,'" said Catharine with an energy that shook her
slight frame. "The Church has no other food to give. Let those who refuse
it go outside. There are other bodies, and other means."
"But, mother, this is the _National_ Church!" pleaded Mary, after a
moment. "The Modernists too say--don't they?--that Christ--or what
Christ stands for--is the bread of life. Only they understand the
words--differently from you. And if"--she came closer to her mother, and
putting her hands on Catharine's knees, she looked up into the elder
woman's face--"if there were only a few here and there, they could of
course do nothing; they could only suffer, and be silent. But there are
so many of them--so many! What is the 'Church' but the living souls that
make it up? And now thousands of these living souls want to change things
in the Church. Their consciences are hurt--they can't believe what they
once believed. What is the justice of driving them out--or leaving them
starved--forever? They were born in the Church; baptized in the Church!
They love the old ways, the old buildings, the old traditions. 'Comfort
our consciences!' they say; 'we will never tyrannize over yours. Give us
the teaching and the expression we want; you will always have what you
want! Make room for us--beside you. If your own faith is strong it will
only be the stronger because you let ours speak and live--because you
give us our bare rights, as free spirits, in this Church that belongs to
the whole English people.' Dear mother, you are so just always--so
loving--doesn't that touch you--doesn't it move you--at all?"
The girl's charming face had grown pale. So had Catharine's.
"This, I suppose, is what you have heard Mr. Meynell say," she answered
slowly.
Mary turned away, shading her eyes with her hand.
"Yes," she said, with shrinking; "at least I know it is what he would
say."
"Oh, Mary, I wish we had never come here!" It was a cry of bitterness,
almost of despair. Mary turned and threw her arms round the speaker's
neck.
"I will never hurt you, my beloved! you know I won't."
The two gazed into each other's eyes, questions and answers, unspoken yet
understood, passing between them. Then Catharine disengaged herself,
rose, and went away.
During the night that followed Mary slept little. She was engaged in
trying to loosen and tear away those tendrils of the heart that had begun
to climb and spread more than she knew. Toward the early dawn it seemed
to her she heard slight sounds in her mother's room. But immediately
afterward she fell asleep.
The next day, Mary could not tell what had happened; but it was as
though, in some inexplicable way, doors had been opened and weights
lifted; as though fresh winds had been set blowing through the House of
Life. Her mother seemed shaken and frail; Mary hovered about her with
ministering tenderness. There were words begun and left unfinished,
movements and looks that strangely thrilled and bewildered the younger
woman. She had no key to them; but they seemed to speak of change--of
something in her mother that had been beaten down, and was still faintly,
pitifully striving. But she dared say nothing. They read, and wrote
letters, and strolled as usual; till in the evening, while Mary was
sitting by the water, Catherine came out to her and stood beside her,
holding the local paper in her hand.
"I see there is to be a meeting in the village next Friday--of the
Reformers' League. Mr. Meynell is to speak."
Mary looked up in amazement.
"Yes?"
"You would perhaps like to go. I will go with you."
"Mother!" Mary caught her mother's hand and kissed it, while the tears
sprang to her eyes. "I want to go nowhere--to do nothing--that gives you
pain!"
"I know that," said Catharine quietly. "But I--I should like to
understand him."
And with a light touch of her hand on Mary's red-gold hair, she went back
into the house. Mary wandered away by herself into the depths of the
woods, weeping, she scarcely knew why. But some sure instinct, lost in
wonder as she was, bade her ask her mother no questions; to let time
show.
The day of the League meeting came. It happened also to be the date on
which the Commission of Inquiry into the alleged heresies and
irregularities of the Rector of Upcote was holding its final meeting at
Markborough.
The meetings of the commission were held in the Library of the Cathedral,
once a collegiate church of the Cistercian order. All trace of the great
monastery formerly connected with it had disappeared, except for the
Library and a vaulted room below it which now made a passageway from the
Deanery to the north transept.
The Library offered a worthy setting for high themes. The walls were, of
course, wreathed in the pale golds and dignified browns of old books. A
light gallery ran round three sides of the room, while a large
perpendicular window at the farther end contained the armorial bearings
of various benefactors of the see. Beneath the window was a bookcase
containing several chained books--a Vulgate, a Saint Augustine, the
_Summa_ of St. Thomas; precious possessions, and famous in the annals of
early printing. And wherever there was a space of wall left free,
pictures or engravings of former bishops and dignitaries connected with
the Cathedral enforced the message and meaning of the room.
A seemly, even beautiful place--pleasantly scented with old leather, and
filled on this September afternoon with the sunshine which, on the Chase,
was at the same moment kindling the heather into a blood-red
magnificence. Here the light slipped in gently, subdued to the quiet note
and standard of the old Library.
The Dean was in the Chair. He was a man of seventy who had only just
become an old man, submitting with difficulty, even with resentment, to
the weight of his years. He wore a green shade over his eyes, beneath
which his long sharp nose and pointed chin--in the practical absence of
the eyes--showed with peculiar emphasis. He was of heavy build, and
suffered from chronic hoarseness. In his youth he had been a Broad
churchman and a Liberal, and had then passed, through stages mysterious
to his oldest friends, into an actively dogmatic and ecclesiastical
phase. It was rumoured that he had had strange spiritual experiences; a
"vision" was whispered; but all that was really known was that from an
"advanced" man, in the Liberal sense, he had become the champion of high
orthodoxy in the Chapter, and an advocate of disestablishment as the only
means of restoring "Catholic liberty" to the Church.
The Dean's enemies, of whom he had not a few, brought various charges
against him. It was said that he was a worldling with an undue leaning to
notabilities. And indeed in every gathering, social or ecclesiastical,
the track of the Dean's conversation sufficiently indicated the relative
importance of the persons present. Others declared that during his long
tenure of a country living he had left the duties of it mainly to a
curate, and had found it more interesting to live in London, conferring
with Cabinet Ministers on educational reform; while the women-folk of the
Chapter pitied his wife, whose subdued or tremulous aspect certainly
suggested that the Dean's critical and sarcastic temper sharpened itself
at home for conflicts abroad.
On the Dean's right hand sat Canon Dornal, a man barely forty, who owed
his canonry to the herculean work he had done for fourteen years in a
South London parish, work that he would never have relinquished for the
comparative ease of the Markborough precincts but for a sudden failure in
health which had pulled him up in mid-career, and obliged him to think of
his wife and children. He had insisted, however, on combining with his
canonry a small living in the town, where he could still slave as he
pleased; and his sermons in the Cathedral were generally held to be, next
to the personality of the Bishop, all that was noblest in Markborough
Christianity. His fine head, still instinct with the energy of youth, was
covered with strong black hair; dark brows shadowed Cornish blue eyes,
simple, tranquil, almost _naif_, until of a sudden there rushed into them
the passionate or tender feeling that was in truth the heart of the man.
The mouth and chin were rather prominent, and, when at rest, severe. He
was a man in whom conscience was a gadfly, remorseless and tormenting. He
was himself overstrained and his influence sometimes produced in others a
tension on which they looked back with resentment. But he was a saint;
open, pure, and loving as a child; yet often tempest-driven with new
ideas, since he possessed at once the imagination that frees a man from
tradition, and the piety which clings to it.
Beside him sat a University professor, the young holder of an important
chair, who had the face, the smile, the curly hair of a boy of twenty, or
appeared to have them, till you came to notice the subtleties of the
mouth and the crow's-feet which had gathered round the eyes. And the
paradox of his aspect only repeated the paradox within. His "History and
the Gospels," recently published, would have earned him excommunication
under any Pope; yet no one was a more rigid advocate of tests and creeds,
or could be more eloquent in defence of damnatory clauses. The clergy who
admired and applauded him did not read his books. It was rumoured indeed
that there were many things in them which were unsound; but the rumour
only gave additional zest to the speeches in which at Church Congresses
and elsewhere he flattered clerical prejudice, and encouraged clerical
ignorance. To him there was no more "amusing" study--using "amusing" in
the French sense as meaning something that keeps a man intellectually
happy and awake--than the study of the Gospels. They presented an endless
series of riddles, and riddles were what he liked. But the scientific
treatment of these riddles had, according to him, nothing to do with the
discipline of the Church; and to the discipline of the Church this young
man, with the old eyes and mouth, was rigorously attached. He was a
bachelor and a man of means--facts which taken together with his literary
reputation and his agreeable aspect made him welcome among women; of
which he was well aware.
The Archdeacon, Doctor Froswick, and the Rural Dean, Mr. Brathay, who
completed the Commission of Inquiry, were both men of middle age; the
Archdeacon, fresh-coloured and fussy, a trivial, kindly person of no
great account; the Rural Dean, broad-shouldered and square-faced, a
silent, trustworthy man, much beloved in a small circle.
A pile of books, MSS., and letters lay to the Chairman's right hand. On
the blotting-pad before him was the voluminous written report of the
commission which only awaited the signatures of the Commissioners,
and--as to one paragraph in it--a final interview with Meynell himself,
which had been fixed for noon. Business was now practically over till he
arrived, and conversation had become general.
"You have seen the leader in the _Oracle_ this morning?" asked the
Archdeacon, nervously biting his quill. "Perfectly monstrous, I think! I
shall withdraw my subscription."
"With the _Oracle_," said the Professor, "it will be a mere question of
success or failure. At present they are inclined to back the rebellion."
"And not much wonder!" put in the Dean's hoarse voice. "The news this
morning is uncommonly bad. Four more men joined the League here--a whole
series of League meetings in Yorkshire!--half the important newspapers
gone over or neutral--and a perfectly scandalous speech from the Bishop
of Dunchester!"
"I thought we should hear of Dunchester before long," said the Professor,
with a sarcastic lip. "Anything that annoys his brethren has his constant
support. But if the Church allows a Socinian to be put over her, she must
take the consequences!"
"What can the Church do?" said the Dean, shrugging his shoulders. "If we
had accepted Disestablishment years ago, Dunchester would never have been
a bishop. And now we may have missed our chance."
"Of what?"--Canon Dornal looked up--"of Disestablishment?"
The Dean nodded.
"The whole force of _this_ Liberal movement," he said slowly, "will be
thrown against Disestablishment. There comes the dividing line between it
and the past. I say again, we have missed our chance. If the High
Churchmen had known their own minds--if they had joined hands boldly with
the Liberation society, and struck off the State fetters--we should at
least have been left in quiet possession of what remained to us. We
should not have been exposed to this treachery from within. Or, at least,
we should have made short work of it."
"That means, that you take for granted we should have kept our endowments
and our churches?" said Canon Dornal.
The Dean flushed.
"We have been called a nation of shopkeepers," he said vehemently, "but
nobody has ever called us a nation of thieves."
The Canon was silent. Then his eye caught the bulky MS. report lying
before the Dean, and he made a restless movement as though the sight of
it displeased him.
"The demonstrations the papers report this morning are not all on one
side," said the Rural Dean slowly but cheerfully, as though from a rather
unsatisfactory reverie this fact had emerged.
"No--there seems to have been something like a riot at Darwen's church,"
observed the Archdeacon. "What can they expect? You don't outrage
people's dearest feelings for nothing. The scandal and misery of it! Of
course we shall put it down--but the Church won't recover for a
generation. And all that this handful of agitators may advertise
themselves and their opinions!"
Canon Dornal frowned and fidgeted.
"We must remember," he said, "that--unfortunately--they have the greater
part of European theology behind them."
"European theology!" cried the Archdeacon. "I suppose you mean German
theology?"
"The same thing--almost," said the Canon, smiling a little sadly.
"And what on earth does German theology matter to us?" retorted the
Archdeacon. "Haven't we got theologians of our own? What have the Germans
ever done but set up one mare's nest after another, for us to set right?
They've no sooner launched some cocksure theory or other than they have
to give it up. I don't read German," said the Archdeacon, hastily, "but
that's what I understand from the Church papers."
Silence a moment. The Professor looked at the ceiling, a smile twitching
the corners of his mouth. The green shade concealed the Dean's
expression. He also knew no German, but it did not seem necessary to say
so. Canon Dornal looked uncomfortable.
"Do you see who it was that protected Darwen from the roughs outside his
church?" he said presently.
Brathay looked up.
"A party of Wesleyans?--class-leaders? Yes, I saw. Oh! Darwen has always
been on excellent terms with the Dissenters!"
"Meynell too," said the Professor. "That of course is their game. Meynell
has always gone for the inclusion of the Dissenters."
"Well, it was Arnold's game!" said the Canon, his look kindling. "Don't
let's forget that. Meynell's dream is not unlike his--to include
everybody that would be included."
"Except the Unitarians," said the Professor with emphasis--"the deniers
of the Incarnation. Arnold drew the line there. So must we."
He spoke with a crisp and smiling decision--as of one in authority. All
kinds of assumptions lay behind his manner. Dornal looked at him with a
rather troubled and hostile eye. This whole matter of the coming trial
was to him deeply painful. He would have given anything to avoid it; but
he did not see how it could be avoided. The extraordinary spread of the
Movement indeed had made it impossible.
At this moment one of the vergers of the Cathedral entered the room to
say that Mr. Meynell was waiting below. The Dean directed that he should
be shown up, and the whole commission dropped their conversational air
and sat expectant.
Meynell came in, rather hastily, brushing his hair back from his
forehead. He shook hands with the Dean and the Archdeacon, and bowed
to the other members of the commission. As he sat down, the Archdeacon,
who was very sensitive to such things, and was himself a model of
spick-and-span-ness, noticed that the Rector's coat was frayed, and one
of the buttons loose. Anne indeed was not a very competent valet of her
master; and nothing but a certain esthetic element in Meynell preserved
him from a degree of personal untidiness which might perhaps have been
excused in a man alternating, hour by hour, between his study-table and
the humblest practical tasks among his people.
[Illustration: "He shook hands with the Dean"]
The other members of the commission observed him attentively. Perhaps all
in their different ways and degrees were conscious of change in him: the
change wrought insensibly in a man by some high pressure of emotion and
responsibility--the change that makes a man a leader of his fellows,
consecrates and sets him apart. Canon Dornal watched him with a secret
sympathy and pity. The Archdeacon said to himself with repugnance that
Meynell now had the look of a fanatic.
The Dean took a volume from the pile beside him, and opened it at a
marked page.
"Before concluding our report to the Bishop, Mr. Meynell, we wished to
have your explanation of an important passage in one of your recent
sermons; and you have been kind enough to meet us with a view to giving
us that explanation. Will you be so good as to look at the passage?"
He handed the book to Meynell, who read it in silence. The few marked
sentences concerned the Resurrection.
"These Resurrection stories have for our own days mainly a symbolic,
perhaps one might call it a sacramental, importance. They are the
'outward and visible' sign of an inward mystery. As a simple matter of
fact the continuous life of the spirit of Christ in mankind began with
the death of Jesus of Nazareth. The Resurrection beliefs, so far as we
can see, were the natural means by which that Life was secured."
"Are we right in supposing, Mr. Meynell," said the Dean, slowly, "that in
those sentences you meant to convey that the Resurrection narratives of
the New Testament were not to be taken as historical fact, but merely as
mythical--or legendary?"
"The passage means, I think, what it says, Mr. Dean."
"It is not, strictly speaking, logically incompatible," said the
Professor, bending forward with a suave suggestiveness, "with acceptance
of the statement in the Creed?"
Meynell threw him a slightly perplexed look, and did not reply
immediately. The Dean sharply interposed.
"Do you in fact accept the statements of the Creed? In that case we might
report to the Bishop that you felt you had been misinterpreted--and would
withdraw the sermon complained of, in order to allay the scandal it has
produced?"
Meynell looked up.
"No," he said quietly, "no; I shall not withdraw the sermon.
Besides"--the faintest gleam of a smile seemed to flit through the
speaker's tired eyes--"that is only one of so many passages."
There was a moment's silence. Then Canon Dornal said:
"Many things--many different views--as we all know, are permitted, must
be permitted, nowadays. But the Resurrection--is vital!"
"The physical fact?" said Meynell gently. His look met that of Dornal;
some natural sympathy seemed to establish itself at once between them.
"The _historical_ fact. If you could see your way to withdraw some of the
statements in these volumes on this particular subject, much relief would
be given to many--many wounded consciences."
The voice was almost pleading. The Dean moved abruptly in his chair.
Dornal's tone was undignified and absurd. Every page of the books teemed
with heresy!
But Meynell was for the moment only aware of his questioner. He leaned
across the table as though addressing him alone.
"To us too--the Resurrection is vital--the transposition of it, I
mean--from the natural, or physical to the spiritual order."
Dornal did not of course attempt to argue. But as Meynell met the
sensitive melancholy of his look the Rector remembered that during the
preceding year Dornal had lost a little son, a delicate, gifted child, to
whom he had been peculiarly attached. And Meynell's quick imagination
realized in a moment the haunted imagination of the other--the dear ghost
that lived there--and the hopes that grouped themselves about it.
* * * * *
A long wrestle followed between Meynell and the Professor. But Meynell
could not be induced to soften or recant anything. He would often say
indeed with an eager frown, when confronted with some statement of his
own, "That was badly put! It should be so-and-so." And then would follow
some vivid correction or expansion, which sometimes left the matter worse
than before. The hopes of the Archdeacon, for one set of reasons, and of
Dornal, for another, that some bridge of retreat might be provided by the
interview, died away. The Dean had never hoped anything, and Mr. Brathay
sat open-mouthed and aghast, while Meynell's voice and personality drove
home ideas and audacities which on the printed page were but dim to him.
Why had the Anglican world been told for the last fifteen years that the
whole critical onslaught--especially the German onslaught--was a beaten
and discredited thing? It seemed to him terribly alive!
* * * * *
The library door opened again, and Meynell disappeared--ceremoniously
escorted to the threshold by the Professor. When that gentleman was
seated again, the Dean addressed the meeting.
"A most unsatisfactory interview! There is nothing for it, I fear, but to
send in our report unaltered to the Bishop. I must therefore ask you to
append your signatures."
All signed, and the meeting broke up.
"Do you know at all when the case is likely to come on?" said Dornal to
the Dean.
"Hardly before November. The Letters of Request are ready. Then after the
Arches will come the appeal to the Privy Council. The whole thing may
take some time."
"You see the wild talk in some of the papers this morning," said the
Professor, interposing, "about a national appeal to Parliament to 'bring
the Articles of the Church of England into accordance with modern
knowledge.' If there is any truth in it, there may be an Armageddon
before us."
Dornal looked at him with distaste. The speaker's light tone, the note of
relish in it, as of one delighting in the drama of life, revolted him.
On coming out of the Cathedral Library, Dornal walked across to the
Cathedral and entered. He found his way to a little chapel of St. Oswald
on the north side, where he was often wont to sit or kneel for ten
minutes' quiet in a busy day. As he passed the north transept he saw
a figure sitting motionless in the shadow, and realized that it was
Meynell.
The silence of the great Cathedral closed round him. He was conscious of
nothing but his own personality, and, as it seemed, of Meynell's. They
two seemed to be alone together in a world outside the living world.
Dornal could not define it, save that it was a world of reconciled
enmities and contradictions. The sense of it alternated with a
disagreeable recollection of the table in the Library and the men sitting
round it, especially the cherubic face of the Professor; the thought also
of the long, signed document which reported the "heresy" of Meynell.
He had been quite right to sign it. His soul went out in a passionate
adhesion to the beliefs on which his own life was built. Yet still the
strange reconciling sense flowed in and round him, like the washing of a
pure stream. He was certain that the Eternal Word had been made flesh in
Jesus of Nazareth, had died and risen, and been exalted; that the Church
was now the mysterious channel of His risen life. He must, in mere
obedience and loyalty, do battle for that certainty--guard it as the
most precious thing in life for those that should come after.
Nevertheless he was conscious that there was in him none of the righteous
anger, none of the moral condemnation, that his father or grandfather
might have felt in the same case. As far as _feeling_ went, nothing
divided him from Meynell. They two across the commission table--as
accuser and accused--had recognized, each in the other, the man of faith.
The same forces played on both, mysteriously linking them, as the same
sea links the headland which throws back its waves with the harbour which
receives them.
* * * * *
Meynell too was conscious of Dornal as somewhere near him in the still,
beautiful place, but only vaguely. He was storm-beaten by the labour and
excitement of the preceding weeks, and these moments of rest in the
Cathedral were sometimes all that enabled him to go through his day. He
endeavoured often at such times to keep his mind merely vacant and
passive, avoiding especially the active religious thoughts which were
more than brain and heart could continuously bear. "One cannot always
think of it--one must not!" he would say to himself impatiently. And then
he would offer himself eagerly to the mere sensuous impressions of the
Cathedral--its beauty, its cool prismatic spaces, its silences.
He did so to-day, though always conscious beyond the beauty, and the
healing quiet, of the mysterious presence on which he "propped his
soul."...
Conscious, too, of a dear human presence, closely interwoven now with his
sense of things ineffable.
Latterly, as we have seen, he had not been without some scanty
opportunities of meeting Mary Elsmere. In Miss Puttenham's drawing-room,
whither the common anxiety about Hester had drawn him on many occasions,
he had chanced once or twice on Miss Puttenham's new friend. In the
village, Mrs. Flaxman was beginning to give him generous help; the parish
nurse was started. And sometimes when she came to consult, her niece was
with her, and Meynell, while talking to the aunt either of his people or
of the progress of the heresy campaign, was always keenly aware of the
girlish figure beside her--of the quick, shy smile--the voice and its
tones.
She was with him in spirit--that he knew--passionately knew. But the
barriers between them were surely insurmountable. Her sympathy with him
was like some warm, stifled thing--some chafing bird "beating up against
the wind."
For a time, indeed, he had tried to put love from him, in the name of his
high enterprise and its claims upon him. But as he sat tranced in the
silence of the Cathedral that attempt finally gave way. His longing was
hopeless, but it enriched his life. For it was fused with all that held
him to his task; all that was divinest and sincerest in himself.
One of the great bells of the Cathedral struck the quarter. His moment of
communion and of rest broke up. He rose abruptly and left the Cathedral
for the crowded streets outside, thinking hard as he walked of quite
other things.
The death of Mrs. Sabin in her son's cottage had been to Meynell like a
stone flung into some deep shadowed pool--the ripples from it had been
spreading through the secret places of life and thought ever since.
He had heard of the death on the morning after it occurred. John Broad,
an inarticulate, secretive fellow, had come to the Rectory in quest of
the Rector within a few hours of its occurrence. His mother had returned
home, he said, unexpectedly, after many years of wanderings in the
States; he had not had very much conversation with her, as she had seemed
ill and tired and "terrible queer" when she arrived. He and his boys had
given up their room to her for the night, and she had been very late in
coming downstairs the following morning. He had had to go to his work,
and when he came back in the evening he found her in great pain and
unable to talk to him. She would not allow him to call any doctor, and
had locked herself in her room. In the morning he had forced the door and
had found her dead. He did not know that she had seen anybody but himself
and his boys since her arrival.
But she had seen some one else. As the Rector walked along the street he
had in his pocket a cutting from the Markborough _Post_, containing the
report of the inquest, from which it appeared--the Rector of course was
well aware of it--that Mr. Henry Barron of the White House, going to the
cottage to complain of the conduct of the children in the plantation, had
found her there, and had talked to her for some time. "I thought her
excited--and overtired--no doubt by the journey," he had said to the
Coroner. "I tried to persuade her to let me send in a woman to look after
her, but she refused."
In Barron's evidence at the inquest, to which Meynell had given close
attention, there had been no hint whatever as to the nature of his
conversation with Mrs. Sabin. Nor had there been any need to inquire. The
medical evidence was quite clear as to the cause of death--advanced brain
disease, fatally aggravated by the journey.
Immediately after his interview with John Broad the Rector had
communicated the news of Mrs. Sabin's unexpected arrival and sudden death
to two other persons in the village. He still thought with infinite
concern of the effect it had produced on one of them. Since his hurried
note telling her of Barron's evidence before the Coroner, and of his own
impressions of it, he had not seen her. But he must not leave her too
much to herself. A patient and tender pity, as of one on whom the burden
of a struggling and suffering soul has long been thrown, dictated all his
thoughts of her. He had himself perceived nothing which need alarm her in
Barron's appearance at the inquest. Barron's manner to himself had been
singularly abrupt and cold when they happened to run across each other,
outside the room in which the inquest was held; but all that was
sufficiently explained by the position of the heresy suit.
Still anxiously pondering, Meynell passed the last houses in the
Cathedral Close. The last of all belonged to Canon France, and Meynell
had no sooner left it behind him than a full and portly figure emerged
from its front door.
Barron--for it was he--stood a moment looking after the retreating
Rector. A hunter's eagerness gave sharpening, a grim sharpening, to the
heavy face; yet there was perplexity mixed with the eagerness. His
conversation with France had not been very helpful. The Canon's worldly
wisdom and shrewd contempt for enthusiasts had found their natural food
in the story which Barron had brought him. His comments had been witty
and pungent enough. But when it had come to the practical use of the
story, France had been of little assistance. His advice inclined too much
to the Melbourne formula--"Can't you let it alone?" He had pointed out
the risks, difficulties, and uncertainties of the matter with quite
unnecessary iteration. Of course there were risks and difficulties; but
was a man of the type of Richard Meynell to be allowed to play the
hypocrite, as the rapidly emerging leader of a religious movement--a
movement directed against the unity and apostolicity of the English
Church--when there were those looking on who were aware of the grave
suspicions resting on his private life and past history?