Of course! The truth jumped to the eyes, now that one was put in the way

of seeing it. And on this decisive recollection there had followed a rush

of others, no less pertinent: things said by his dead mother about the

brother whom she had loved and bitterly regretted. So the wronged lady

whom he would have married but for his wife's obstinacy was "Aunt Alice!"

Philip remembered to have once seen her from a distance in the Upcote

woods. Hester had pointed her out, finger on lip, as they stood hiding in

a thicket of fern; a pretty woman still. His mother had never mentioned a

name; probably she had never known it; but to the love-affair she had

always attributed some share in her brother's death.

From point to point he tracked it, the poor secret, till he had run it

down. By degrees everything fitted in; he was confident that he had

guessed the truth.

Then, abruptly, he turned to look at its bearing on his own designs and

fortunes.

He supposed himself to be in love with Hester. At any rate he was

violently conscious of that hawk-like instinct of pursuit which he was

accustomed to call love. Hester's mad and childish imprudences, which the

cooler self in Meryon was quite ready to recognize as such, had made the

hawking a singularly easy task so far. Meynell, of course, had put up

difficulties; with regard to this Scotch business it had been necessary

to lie pretty hard, and to bribe some humble folk in order to get round

him. But Hester, by the double fact that she was at once so far removed

from the mere _ingénue_, and so incredibly ready to risk herself, out of

sheer ignorance of life, both challenged and tempted the man whom a

disastrous fate had brought across her path, to such a point that he had

long since lost control of himself, and parted with any scruples of

conscience he might possess.

At the same time he was by no means sure of her. He realized his

increasing power over her; he also realized the wild, independent streak

in her. Some day--any day--the capricious, wilful nature might tire,

might change. The prey might escape, and the hawk go empty home. No

dallying too long! Let him decide what to risk--and risk it.

Meantime that confounded cousin of his was hard at work, through some

very capable lawyers, and unless the instructions he--Philip--had

conveyed to the woman in Scotland, who, thank goodness, was no less

anxious to be rid of him than he to be rid of her, were very shrewdly

and exactly carried out, facts might in the end reach Hester which would

give even her recklessness pause. He knew that so far Meynell had been

baffled; he knew that he carried about with him evidence that, for the

present, could be brought to bear on Hester with effect; but things were

by no means safe.

For his own affairs, they were desperate. As he stood there, he was

nothing more in fact than the common needy adventurer, possessed,

however, of greater daring, and the _dèbris_ of much greater pretensions,

than most such persons. His financial resources were practically at an

end, and he had come to look upon a clandestine marriage with Hester as

the best means of replenishing them. The Fox-Wilton family passed for

rich; and the notion that they must and would be ready to come forward

with money, when once the thing was irrevocable, counted for much in the

muddy plans of which his mind was full. His own idea was to go to South

America--to Buenos Ayres, where money was to be made, and where he had

some acquaintance. In that way he would shake off his creditors, and the

Scotch woman together; and Meynell would know better than to interfere.

* * * * *

Suddenly a light figure came fluttering round the corner of the road

leading to the château and the town. Philip turned and went to meet her.

And as he approached her he was shaken afresh by the excitement of her

presence, in addition to his more sordid preoccupation. Her wild,

provocative beauty seemed to light up the whole wintry scene; and the few

passers-by, each and all, stopped to stare at her. Hester laughed aloud

when she saw Meryon; and with her usual recklessness held up her umbrella

for signal. It pleased her that two _rapins_ in large black ties and

steeple hats paid her an insolent attention as they passed her; and she

stopped to pinch the cheek of a chubby child that had planted itself

straight in her path.

"Am I late?" she said, as they met. "I only just caught the train. Oh! I

am so hungry! Don't let's talk--let's _déjeuner_."

Philip laughed.

"Will you dare the hotel?"

And he pointed to the Pavillion Henri Quatre.

"Why not? Probably there won't be a soul."

"There are always Americans."

"Why not, again? _Tant mieux_! Oh, my hair!"

And she put up her two ungloved hands to try and reduce it to something

like order. The loveliness of the young curving form, of the pretty

hands, of the golden brown hair, struck full on Meryon's turbid sense.

They turned toward the hotel, and were presently seated in a corner of

its glazed gallery, with all the wide, prospect of plain and river spread

beneath them. Hester was in the highest spirits, and as she sat waiting

for the first _plat_, chattering, and nibbling at her roll, her black

felt hat with its plume of cock feathers falling back from the brilliance

of her face, she once more attracted all the attention available; from

the two savants who, after a morning in the Chateau, were lunching at a

farther table; from an American family of all ages reduced to silence

by sheer wonder and contemplation; from the waiters, and, not least, from

the hotel dog, wagging his tail mutely at her knee.

Philip felt himself an envied person. He was, indeed, vain of his

companion; but certain tyrannical instincts asserted themselves once or

twice. When, or if, she became his possession, he would try and moderate

some of this chatter and noise.

For the present he occupied himself with playing to her lead, glancing

every now and then mentally, with a secret start, at the information he

had possessed about her since the morning.

She described to him, with a number of new tricks of gesture caught from

her French class-mates, how she had that morning outwitted all her

guardians, who supposed that she had gone to Versailles with one of the

senior members of the class she was attending at the Conservatoire, a

young teacher, "_très sage_," with whom she had been allowed once or

twice to go to museums and galleries. To accomplish it had required an

elaborate series of deceptions, which Hester had carried through,

apparently, without a qualm. Except that at the end of her story there

was a passing reference to Aunt Alice--"poor darling!"--"who would have a

fit if she knew."

Philip, coffee-cup in hand, half smiling, looked at her meantime through

his partially closed lids. Richard, indeed! She was Neville all through,

the Neville of the picture, except for the colour of the hair, and the

soft femininity. And here she sat, prattling--foolish dear!--about

"mamma," and "Aunt Alice," and "my tiresome sisters!"

"Certainly you shall not pay for me!--not a _sou,_" said Hester flushing.

"I have plenty of money. Take it please, at once." And she pushed her

share over the table, with a peremptory gesture.

Meryon took it with a smile and a shrug, and she, throwing away the

cigarette she had been defiantly smoking, rose from the table.

"Now then, what shall we do? Oh! no museums! I am being educated to

death! Let us go for a walk in the forest; and then I must catch my

train, or the world will go mad."

So they walked briskly into the forest, and were soon sufficiently deep

among its leaf-strewn paths, to be secure from all observation. Two hours

remained of wintry sunlight before they must turn back toward the

station.

Hester walked along swinging a small silk bag in which she carried her

handkerchief and purse. Suddenly, in a narrow path girt by some tall

hollies and withered oaks, she let it fall. Both stooped for it, their

hands touched, and as Hester rose she found herself in Meryon's arms.

She made a violent effort to free herself, and when it failed, she stood

still and submitted to be kissed, like one who accepts an experience,

with a kind of proud patience.

"You think you love me," she said at last, pushing him away. "I wonder

whether you do!"

And flushed and panting, she leant against a tree, looking at him with a

strange expression, in which melancholy mingled with resentment; passing

slowly into something else--that soft and shaken look, that yearning of

one longing and yet fearing to be loved, which had struck dismay into

Meynell on the afternoon when he had pursued her to the Abbey.

Philip came close to her.

"You think I have no Roddy!" she said, with bitterness. "Don't kiss me

again!"

He refrained. But catching her hand, and leaning against the trunk beside

her, he poured into her ear protestations and flattery; the ordinary

language of such a man at such a moment. Hester listened to it with a

kind of eagerness. Sometimes, with a slight frown, as though ear and mind

waited, intently, for something that did not come.

"I wonder how many people you have said the same things to before!" she

said suddenly, looking searchingly into his face. "What have you got to

tell me about that Scotch girl?"

"Richard's Scotch girl?"--he laughed, throwing his handsome head back

against the tree--"whom Richard supposes me to have married? Well, I had

a great flirtation with her, I admit, two years ago, and it is sometimes

rather difficult in Scotland to know whether you are married or no. You

know of course that all that's necessary is to declare yourselves man and

wife before witnesses? However--perhaps you would like to see a letter

from the lady herself on the subject?"

"You had it ready?" she said, doubtfully.

"Well, considering that Richard has been threatening me for months, not

only with the loss of you, but with all sorts of pains and penalties

besides, I have had to do something! Of course I have done a great deal.

This is one of the documents in the case. It is an affidavit really,

drawn up by my solicitor and signed by the lady whom Richard supposes to

be my injured wife!"

He placed an envelope in her hands.

Hester opened it with a touch of scornful reluctance. It contained a

categorical denial and repudiation of the supposed marriage.

"Has Uncle Richard seen it?" she asked coldly, as she gave it back to

him.

"Certainly he has, by now." He took another envelope from his pocket. "I

won't bother you with anything more--the thing is really too absurd!--but

here, if you want it, is a letter from the girl's brother. Brothers are

generally supposed to keep a sharp lookout on their sisters, aren't they?

Well, this brother declares that Meynell's inquiries have come to

nothing, absolutely nothing, in the neighbourhood--except that they have

made people very angry. He has got no evidence--simply because there is

none to get! I imagine, indeed, that by now he has dropped the whole

business. And certainly it is high time he did; or I shall have to be

taking action on my own account before long!"

He looked down upon her, as she stood beside him, trying to make out her

expression.

"Hester!" he broke out, "don't let's talk about this any more--it's

damned nonsense! Let's talk about ourselves. Hester!--darling!--I want

to make you happy!--I want to carry you away. Hester, will you marry me

at once? As far as the French law is concerned, I have arranged it all.

You could come with me to a certain Mairie I know, to-morrow, and we

could marry without anybody having a word to say to it; and then, Hester,

I'd carry you to Italy! I know a villa on the Riviera--the Italian

Riviera--in a little bay all orange and lemon and blue sea. We'd

honeymoon there; and when we were tired of honeymooning--though how could

any one tire of honeymooning, with you, you darling!--we'd go to South

America. I have an opening at Buenos Ayres which promises to make me a

rich man. Come with me!--it is the most wonderful country in the world.

You would be adored there--you would have every luxury--we'd travel and

ride and explore--we'd have a glorious life!"

He had caught her hands again, and stood towering over her, intoxicated

with his own tinsel phrases; almost sincere; a splendid physical

presence, save for the slight thickening of face and form, the looseness

of the lips, the absence of all freshness in the eyes.

But Hester, after a first moment of dreamy excitement, drew herself

decidedly away.

"No, no!--I can't be such a wretch--I can't! Mamma and Aunt Alice would

break their hearts. I'm a selfish beast, but not quite so bad as that!

No, Philip--we can meet and amuse ourselves, can't we?--and get to know

each other?--and then if we want to, we can marry--some time."

"That means you don't love me!" he said, fiercely.

"Yes, yes, I do!--or at least I--I like you. And perhaps in time--if you

let me alone--if you don't tease me--I--I'll marry you. But let's do it

openly. It's amusing to get one's own way, even by lies, up to a certain

point. They wouldn't let me see you, or get to know you, and I was

determined to know you. So I had to behave like a little cad, or give in.

But marrying's different."

He argued with her hotly, pointing out the certainty of Meynell's

opposition, exaggerating the legal powers of guardians, declaring

vehemently that it was now or never. Hester grew very white as they

wandered on through the forest, but she did not yield. Some last scruple

of conscience, perhaps--some fluttering fear, possessed her.

So that in the end Philip was pushed to the villainy that even he would

have avoided.

Suddenly he turned upon her.

"Hester, you drive me to it! I don't want to--but I can't help it.

Hester, you poor little darling!--you don't know what has happened--you

don't know what a position you're in. I want to save you from it. I

would have done it, God knows, without telling you the truth if I could;

but you drive me to it!"

"What on earth do you mean?"

She stopped beside him in a clearing of the forest. The pale afternoon

sun, now dropping fast to westward, slipped through the slender oaks, on

which the red leaves still danced, touched the girl's hair and shone into

her beautiful eyes. She stood there so young, so unconscious; a victim,

on the threshold of doom. Philip, who was no more a monster than other

men who do monstrous things, felt a sharp stab of compunction; and then,

rushed headlong at the crime he had practically resolved on before they

met.

He told her in a few agitated words the whole--and the true--story of her

birth. He described the return of Judith Sabin to Upcote Minor, and the

narrative she had given to Henry Barron, without however a word of

Meynell in the case, so far at least as the original events were

concerned. For he was convinced that he knew better, and that there was

no object in prolonging an absurd misunderstanding. His version of the

affair was that Judith in a fit of excitement had revealed Hester's

parentage to Henry Barron; that Barron out of enmity toward Meynell,

Hester's guardian, and by way of getting a hold upon him, had not kept

the matter to himself, but had either written or instigated anonymous

letters which had spread such excitement in the neighbourhood that Lady

Fox-Wilton had now let her house, and practically left Upcote for good.

The story had become the common talk of the Markborough district; and all

that Meynell, and "your poor mother," and the Fox-Wilton family could do,

was to attempt, on the one hand, to meet the rush of scandal by absence

and silence; and on the other to keep the facts from Hester herself as

long as possible.

The girl had listened to him with wide, startled eyes. Occasionally a

sound broke from her--a gasp--an exclamation--and when he paused, pursued

by almost a murderer's sense of guilt, he saw her totter. In an instant

he had his arm round her, and for once there was both real passion and

real pity in the excited words he poured into her ears.

"Hester, dearest!--don't cry, don't be miserable, my own beautiful

Hester! I am a beast to have told you, but it is because I am not only

your lover, but your cousin--your own flesh and blood. Trust yourself

to me! You'll see! Why should that preaching fellow Meynell interfere?

I'll take care of you. You come to me, and we'll show these damned

scandal-mongers that what they say is nothing to us--that we don't care a

fig for their cant--that we are the masters of our own lives--not they!"

And so on, and so on. The emotion was as near sincerity as he could push

it; but it did not fail to occur, at least once, to a mind steeped in

third-rate drama, what a "strong" dramatic scene might be drawn from the

whole situation.

Hester heard him for a few minutes, in evident stupefaction; then with a

recovery of physical equilibrium she again vehemently repulsed him.

"You are mad--you are _mad_! It is abominable to talk to me like this.

What do you mean? 'My poor mother'--who is my mother?"

She faced him tragically, the certainty which was already dawning in her

mind--prepared indeed, through years, by all the perplexities and

rebellions of her girlhood--betraying itself in her quivering face, and

lips. Suddenly, she dropped upon a fallen log beside the path, hiding her

face in her hands, struggling again with the sheer faintness of the

shock. And Philip, kneeling in the dry leaves beside her, completed his

work, with the cruel mercy of the man who kills what he has wounded.

He asked her to look back into her childhood; he reminded her of the many

complaints she had made to him of her sense of isolation within her

supposed family; of the strange provisions of Sir Ralph's will; of the

arrangement which had made her Meynell's ward in a special sense.

"Why, of course, that was so natural! You remember I suggested to you

once that Richard probably judged Neville from the same Puritanical

standpoint that he judged me? Well, I was a fool to talk like that. I

remember now perfectly what my mother used to say. They were of different

generations, but they were tremendous friends; and there was only a few

years between them. I am certain it was by Neville's wish that Richard

became your guardian." He laughed, in some embarrassment. "He couldn't

exactly foresee that another member of the family would want to cut in. I

love you--I adore you! Let's give all these people the slip. Hester, my

pretty, pretty darling--look at me! I'll show you what life means--what

love means!"

And doubly tempted by her abasement, her bewildered pain, he tried again

to take her in his arms.

But she held him at arm's length.

"If," she said, with pale lips--"if Sir Neville was my father--and Aunt

Alsie"--her voice failed her--"were they--were they never married?"

He slowly and reluctantly shook his head.

"Then I'm--I'm--oh! but that's monstrous--that's absurd! I don't believe

it!"

She sprang to her feet. Then, as she stood confronting his silence, the

whole episode of that bygone September afternoon--the miniature--Aunt

Alice's silence and tears--rushed back on memory. She trembled, and

the iron entered into her soul.

"Let's go back to the station," she said, resolutely. "It's time."

They walked back through the forest paths, for some time without

speaking, she refusing his aid. And all the time swiftly,

inexorably, memory and inference were at work, dragging to light the

deposit--obscure, or troubling, or contradictory--left in her by the

facts and feelings of her childhood and youth.

She had told him with emphasis at luncheon that he was not to be allowed

to accompany her home; that she would go back to Paris by herself. But

when, at the St. Germains station, Meryon jumped into the empty railway

carriage beside her, she said nothing to prevent him. She sat in the

darkest corner of the carriage, her arms hanging beside her, her eyes

fixed on objects of which she saw nothing. Her pride in herself, her

ideal of herself, which is to every young creature like the protective

sheath to the flower, was stricken to the core. She thought of Sarah and

Lulu, whom she had all her life despised and ridiculed. But they had a

right to their name and place in the world!--and she was their nameless

inferior, the child taken in out of pity, accepted on sufferance. She

thought of the gossip now rushing like a mud-laden stream through every

Upcote or Markborough drawing-room. All the persons whom she had snubbed

or flouted were concerning themselves maliciously with her and her

affairs--were pitying "poor Hester Fox-Wilton."

Her heart seemed to dry and harden within her. The strange thought of her

real mother--her suffering, patient, devoted mother--did not move her. It

was bound up with all that trampled on and humiliated her.

And, moreover, strange and piteous fact, realized by them both! this

sudden sense of fall and degradation had in some mysterious way altered

her whole relation to the man who had brought it upon her. His evil power

over her had increased. He felt instinctively that he need not in future

be so much on his guard. His manner toward her became freer. She had

never yet returned him the kisses which, as on this day, she had

sometimes allowed him to snatch. But before they reached Paris she had

kissed him; she had sought his hands with hers; and she had promised to

meet him again.

While these lamentable influences and events were thus sweeping Hester's

life toward the abyss, mocking all the sacrifices and the efforts that

had been made to save her, the publication of Barron's apology had opened

yet another stage in "the Meynell case."

As drafted by Flaxman, it was certainly comprehensive enough. For

himself, Meynell would have been content with much less; but in dealing

with Barron, he was the avenger of wrongs not his own, both public and

private; and when his own first passion of requital had passed away,

killed in him by the anguish of his enemy, he still let Flaxman decide

for him. And Flaxman, the mildest and most placable of men, showed

himself here inexorable, and would allow no softening of terms. So that

Barron "unreservedly withdrew" and "publicly apologized" "for those false

and calumnious charges, which to my great regret, and on erroneous

information, I have been led to bring against the character and conduct

of the Rev. Richard Meynell, at various dates, and in various ways,

during the six months preceding the date of this apology."

With regard to the anonymous letters--"although they were not written,

nor in any way authorized, by me, I now discover to my sorrow that they

were written by a member of my family on information derived from me.

I apologize for and repudiate the false and slanderous statements these

letters contain, and those also included in letters I myself have written

to various persons. I agree that a copy of this statement shall be sent

to the Bishop of Markborough, and to each parish clergyman in the diocese

of Markborough; as also that it shall be published in such newspapers as

the solicitors of the Rev. Richard Meynell may determine."

The document appeared first on a Saturday, in all the local papers, and

was greedily read and discussed by the crowds that throng into

Markborough on market day, who again carried back the news to the

villages of the diocese. It was also published on the same day in

the _Modernist_ and in the leading religious papers. Its effect on

opinion was rapid and profound. The Bishop telegraphed--"Thank God. Come

and see me." France fidgeted a whole morning among his papers, began two

or three letters to Meynell, and finally decided that he could write

nothing adequate that would not also be hypocritical. Dornal wrote a

little note that Meynell put away among those records that are the

milestones of life. From all the leading Modernists, during January,

came a rush of correspondence and congratulations, in all possible notes

and tones of indignant triumph; and many leaders on the other side wrote

with generous emotion and relief. Only in the extreme camp of the extreme

Right there was, of course, silence and chagrin. Compared to the eternal

interests of the Church, what does one man's character matter?

The old Bishop of Dunchester, a kind of English Döllinger, the learned

leader of a learned party, and ready in the last years of life to risk

what would have tasked the nerves and courage of a man in the prime of

physical and mental power, wrote:

"MY DEAR RICHARD MEYNELL: Against my better judgment, I was persuaded

that you might have been imprudent. I now know that you have only been

heroic. Forgive me--forgive us all. Nothing will induce me to preach the

sermon of our opening day. And if you will not, who will, or can?"

Rose meanwhile descended upon the Rectory, and with Flaxman's help,

though in the teeth of Anne's rather jealous opposition, she carried off

Meynell to Maudeley, that she might "help him write his letters," and

watch for a week or two over a man wearied and overtaxed. It was by her

means also that the reaction in public opinion spread far beyond Meynell

himself. It is true that even men and women of good will looked at each

other in bewilderment, after the publication of the apology, and asked

each other under their breaths--"Then is there no story!--and was Judith

Sabin's whole narrative a delusion?" But with whatever might be true in

that narrative no public interest was now bound up; and discussion grew

first shamefaced, and then dropped. The tendency strengthened indeed to

regard the whole matter as the invention of a half-crazy and dying woman,

possessed of some grudge against the Fox-Wilton family. Many surmised

that some tragic fact lay at the root of the tale, since those concerned

had not chosen to bring the slanderer to account. But what had once been

mere matter for malicious or idle curiosity was now handled with

compunction and good feeling. People began to be very sorry for the

Fox-Wiltons, very sorry for "poor Miss Puttenham." Cards were left, and

friendly inquiries were made; and amid the general wave of scepticism and

regret, the local society showed itself as sentimental, and as futile as

usual.

Meanwhile poor Theresa had been seen driving to the station with red

eyes; and her father, it was ascertained, had been absent from home since

the day before the publication of the apology. It was very commonly

guessed that the "member of my family" responsible for the letters was

the unsatisfactory younger son; and many persons, especially in Church

circles, were secretly sorry for Barron, while everybody possessed of any

heart at all was sorry for his elder son Stephen.

Stephen indeed was one of Meynell's chief anxieties during these

intermediate hours, when a strong man took a few days' breathing space

between the effort that had been, and the effort that was to be. The

young man would come over, day by day, with the same crushed, patient

look, now bringing news to Meynell which they talked over where none

might overhear, and now craving news from Paris in return. As to

Stephen's own report, Barron, it seemed, had made all arrangements

to send Maurice to a firm of English merchants trading at Riga. The head

of the firm was under an old financial obligation to Henry Barron, and

Stephen had no doubt that his father had made it heavily worth their

while to give his brother this fresh chance of an honest life. There

had been, Stephen believed, some terrible scenes between the father and

son, and Stephen neither felt nor professed to feel any hope for the

future. Barron intended himself to accompany Maurice to Riga and settle

him there. Afterward he talked of a journey to the Cape. Meanwhile the

White House was shut up, and poor Theresa had come to join Stephen in the

little vicarage whence the course of events in the coming year would

certainly drive him out.

So much for the news he gave. As to the news he hungered for, Meynell had

but crumbs to give him. To neither Stephen nor any one else could Alice

Puttenham's letters be disclosed. Meynell's lips were sealed upon her

story now as they had ever been; and, however shrewdly he might guess at

Stephen's guesses, he said nothing, and Stephen asked nothing on the

subject.

As to Hester, he was told that she was well, though often moody and

excitable, that she seemed already to have tired of the lessons and

occupations she had taken up with such prodigious energy at the beginning

of her stay, and that she had made violent friends with a young teacher

from the École Normale, a refined, intelligent woman, in every way fit to

be her companion, with whom on holidays she sometimes made long

excursions out of Paris.

But to Meynell, poor Alice Puttenham poured out all the bitterness of her

heart:

"It seems to me that the little hold I had over her, and the small

affection she had for me when we arrived here, are both now less than

they were. During the last week especially (the letter was dated the

fourteenth of January) I have been at my wits' end how to amuse or please

her. She resents being watched and managed more than ever. One feels

there is a tumult in her soul to which we have no access. Her teachers

complain of her temper and her caprice. And yet she dazzles and

fascinates as much as ever. I suspect she doesn't sleep--she has a worn

look quite unnatural at her age--but it makes her furious to be asked.

Sometimes, indeed, she seems to melt toward me; the sombre look passes

away, and she is melancholy and soft, with tears in her eyes now and

then, which I dare not notice.

"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 Molière--"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 nobleness 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

document 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 passed. 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

passed, 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 assumed

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 snowball of the petition

to Parliament, to the now certain introduction of a Bill "To promote an

amended constitution 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 passionate 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

grass, and twig and stone; and overhead the slowly passing 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 grass

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 passage 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 nobility 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, passionately 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.

Lines from the _Christian Year_, the book on which her girlhood had been

nourished, stole into her mind:

Why should we faint and fear to live alone,

Since all alone, so Heaven has willed, we die?

Never had sunshine seemed to Meynell so life-giving as this pale wintry

warmth. The soft sound of Mary's dress beside him; the eyes she turned

upon him when she spoke, so frank and sweet, yet for her lover, so full

of mystery; the lines of her young form, compact of health and grace; the

sound of her voice, the turn of her head--everything about her filled him

with a tumult of feeling not altogether blissful, though joy was

uppermost. For now that the great moment was come, now that he trembled

on the verge of a happiness he had every reason to think was his, he was

a prey to many strange qualms and tremors. In the first place he was

suddenly and sorely conscious of his age! Forty-four to her twenty-six!

Was it fitting?--was it right? And more than that! Beside her freshness,

her springing youth, he realized his own jaded spirit, almost with a

sense of guilt. These six months of strenuous battle and leadership,

these new responsibilities, and the fierce call which had been made on

every gift and power, ending in the dumb, proud struggle, the growing

humiliation of the preceding weeks, had left him ripened indeed,

magnified indeed, as a personality; but it was as though down the

shadowed vista of life he saw his youth, as "Another self," a

Doppelgänger, disappearing forever.

While she!--before _her_ were all the years of glamour, of happy

instinctive action, when a man or woman is worth just what they dream,

when dream and act flow together. Could he give her anything worth her

having in exchange for this sheer youth of hers? He saw before him a long

and dusty struggle; the dust of it choking, often, the purest sources of

feeling. Cares about money; cares about health; the certain enmity of

many good men; the bitterness that waits on all controversial success or

failure: all these there must be--he could not shield her from them.

She, on her part, saw plainly that he was depressed, knew well that he

had suffered. As the Bishop had perceived, it was written on his aspect.

But her timidity as yet prevented her from taking the initiative with

him, as later she would learn to do. She felt for him at this stage

partly the woman's love, partly the deep and passionate loyalty of the

disciple. And it was possibly this very loyalty in her from which Meynell

shrank. He felt toward himself and his role, in the struggle to which he

was committed, a half despairing, half impatient irony, which saved him

from anything like a prophetic pose. Some other fellow would do it so

much better! But meanwhile it had to be done.

So that, charged as was the atmosphere between them, it was some time

before they found a real freedom of speech. The openings, the gambits,

which were to lead them to the very heart of the game, were at first

masked and hesitating. They talked a little--perfunctorily--about the

dale and its folk, and Mary fell without difficulty now and then into the

broad Westmoreland speech, which delighted Meynell's ear, and brought the

laugh back to his eyes. Then, abruptly, he told her that the campaign of

slander was over, and that the battle, instead of "infinite mess and

dislocation," was now to be a straight and clean one. He said nothing of

Barron; but he spoke tenderly of the Bishop, and Mary's eyes swam a

little.

She on her part dared to speak of Alice and Hester. And very soon it was

quietly recognized between these two that Alice's story was known to

Mary; and, for the first time in his life, Meynell spoke with free

emotion and self-criticism of the task which Neville Flood had laid

upon him. Had there been in Mary some natural dread of the moment when

she must first hear the full story of his relation to Alice? If so, it

was soon dispelled. He could not have told the story more simply; but its

beauty shone out. Only, she was startled, even terrified, by certain

glimpses which his talk gave her into his feeling with regard to Hester.

She saw plainly that the possibility of a catastrophe, in spite of all he

could do, was ever present to him; and she saw also, or thought she saw,

that his conception of his own part in the great religious campaign was

strangely--morbidly--dependent upon the fate of Hester. If he was able to

save her from herself and from the man who threatened her, well and good;

if not, as he had said to Mary once before, he was not fit to be any

man's leader, and should feel himself the Jonah of any cause. There was a

certain mystical passion in it, the strong superstition of a man in whom

a great natural sensitiveness led often and readily to despondency; as

though he "asked for a sign."

They passed the noisy little river by the stepping-stones and then

climbed a shoulder of fell between Long Whindale and the next valley.

Descending a sunny mountainside, they crossed some water meadows, and

mounted the hill beyond, to a spot that Mary had marked in her walks.

Beside a little tumbling stream and beneath a thicket of holly, lay a

flat-topped rock commanding all the spectacle of flood and fell. Mary

guided him there; and then stood silent and flushed, conscious that she

herself had brought the supreme moment to its birth. The same perception

rushed upon Meynell. He looked into her eyes, smiling and masterful, all

his hesitations cleared away....

"Sit there, my lady of the fells!"

He led her to the rocky throne, and, wrapped in his old Inverness cloak,

he took a place on a lesser stone at her feet. Suddenly, he raised a hand

and caught hers. She found herself trembling, and looking down into his

upturned face.

"Mary!--Mary _darling_!--is it mine?"

The question was just whispered, and she whispered her reply. They were

alone in a lovely wilderness of fell and stream. Only a shepherd walked

with his flock in a field half a mile away, and across the valley a

ploughman drove his horses.

At the murmur in his ear, Meynell, this time, put up both hands, and drew

her down to him. The touch of her fresh lips was rapture. And yet--

"My rose!" he said, almost with a groan. "What can you make of such an

old fellow? I love you--_love_ you--but I am not worthy of you!"

"I am the judge of that," she said softly. And looking up he saw the

colour in her cheeks fluttering, and two bright tears in her eyes.

Timidly she took one hand away from him and began to stroke back the hair

from his brow.

"You look so tired!"--she murmured--"as though you had been in trouble.

And I wasn't there!"

"You were always there!"

And springing from his lowly seat, he came to the rock beside her, and

drew her within the shelter of his cloak, looking down upon her with

infinite tenderness.

"You don't know what you're undertaking," he said, his eyes moist, his

lips smiling. "I am an old bachelor, and my ways are detestable! Can you

ever put up with the pipes and the dogs? I am the untidiest man alive!"

"Will Anne ever let me touch your papers?"

"Goodness! what will Anne say to us! I forgot Anne," he said, laughing.

Then, bending over her, "We shall be poor, darling!--and very

uncomfortable. Can you really stand it--and me?"

"Shall we have a roof over our heads at all?" asked Mary, but so dizzily

happy that she knew but vaguely what she said.

"I have already bespoken a cottage. They are going to make me Editor of

the _Modernist_. We shall have bread and butter, dearest, but not much

more."

"I have a little," said Mary, shyly.

Meynell looked rather scared.

"Not much, I hope!"

"Enough for gowns!--and--and a little more."

"I prefer to buy my wife's gowns--I will!" said Meynell with energy.

"Promise me, darling, to put all your money into a drawer--or a

money-box. Then when we want something really amusing--a cathedral--or

a yacht--we'll take it out."

So they laughed together, he all the while holding her close crushed

against him, and she deafened almost by the warm beating of a man's heart

beneath her cheek.

And presently silence came, a silence in which one of the rare ecstasies

of life came upon them and snatched them to the third heaven. From the

fold of the hill in which they sat, sheltered both by the fell itself,

and by the encircling hollies, they overlooked a branching dale, half

veiled, and half revealed by sunny cloud. Above the western fells they

had just crossed, hung towers and domes of white cumulus, beneath which a

pearly sunshine slipped through upon the broad fell-side, making of it

one wide sunlit pleasance, dyed in the red and orange of the withered

fern, and dotted with black holly and juniper. Round the head of the dale

the curtain of cloud hung thicker, save where one superb crag tore it

asunder, falling sheer into the green gentleness of the fields. In the

silence, all the voices of nature spoke; the rising wind, which flung

itself against the hill-slopes at their feet; the insistent flow of the

river, descending from the reservoirs far away; and the sharp chatter of

the little beck leaping at their side from stone to stone. Passionately,

in Meynell's heart the "buried life" awoke, which only love can free from

the cavern where it lies, and bring into the full energy of day.

"One goes on talking--preaching--babbling--about love," he said to her;

"what else is there to preach about? If love is not the key to life, then

there is no key, and no man need preach any more. Only, my Amor has been

till now a stern God! He has in his hands!--I know it!--all the noblest

rewards and ecstasies of life; but so far, I have seen him wring them out

of horror, or pain. The most heavenly things I have ever seen have been

the things of suffering. I think of a poor fellow dying in the pit and

trying to give me his last message to his wife; of a mother fading out of

life, still clasping her babes, with hands twisted almost out of human

shape by hard work; or a little lad--" his voice dropped--"only last

week!--who saved his worthless brother's life by giving him warning of

some escaping trucks, and was crushed himself. 'I couldn't help it,

sir!'--_apologizing_ to me and the foreman, as we knelt by him!--'I knew

Jim had the drink in him.' In all these visions, Love was divine--but

awful! And here!--_here_!--I see his wings outspread upon that

mountain-side; he comes clothed, not in agony, but in this golden

peace--this beauty--this wild air; he lays your head upon my breast!"

Or again:

"There is a new philosophy which has possessed me for months; the thought

of a great man, which seizes upon us dull lesser creatures, and seems to

give us, for a time at least, new eyes and ears, as though, like

Melampus, we had caught the hidden language of the world! It rests

on the notion of the endless creativeness and freedom of life. It is the

negation of all fate, all predestination. _Nothing_ foreknown, nothing

predestined! No _necessity_--no _anangké_--darling!--either in the world

process, or the mind of God, that you and I should sit here to-day, heart

to heart! It was left for our wills to do, our hearts to conceive, God

lending us the world, so to speak, to work on! All our past cutting

into--carving out--this present; all our past alive in the present; as

all this present shall be alive in the future. There is no 'iron law' for

life and will, beloved--they create, they are the masters, they are

forever new. All the same!"--his tone changed--"I believe firmly that

this rock knew from all eternity that you and I should sit here to-day!"

Presently, Mary disengaged herself. Her hat was not what it had been; her

hair had escaped its bounds, and must be rigorously put to rights. She

sat there flushed and bareheaded, her hands working; while Meynell's

eyes devoured her.

"It is January, Richard, and the sun is sinking."

"In your world perhaps, dear, not in mine."

"We must go back to mother." She laid a hand on his.

"We will go back to mother!" he said, joyously, with a tender emphasis on

the word, without moving however. "Mary!--next to you I love your

mother!"

Mary's sweet face darkened a little; she buried it in her hands. Meynell

drew them tenderly away.

"All that affection can do to soften the differences between us, shall be

done," he said, with his whole heart. "I believe too that the sense of

them will grow less and less."

Mary made no reply, except by the slight pressure of her fingers on his.

She sat in an absorbed sadness, thinking of her mother's life, and the

conflict which had always haunted and scorched it, between love and

religion; first in the case of her husband, and then in that of her

daughter. "But oh! how could I--how could I help it?" was the cry of

Mary's own conscience and personality.

She turned with painful eagerness to Meynell. "How did you think

her?--how does she strike you?"

"Physically?" He chose his words. "She is so beautiful! But--sometimes--I

think she looks frail."

The tears sprang to Mary's eyes. She quickly threw herself upon his

misgiving, and tried to argue it away, both in herself and him. She dwelt

upon her mother's improvement in sleep and appetite, her cheerfulness,

her increased power of walking; she was insistent, almost resentful, her

white brow furrowed with pain, even while her hand lay warm in Meynell's.

He must needs comfort her; must needs disavow his own impression. After

all, what value had such an impression beside the judgment of her daily

and hourly watchfulness?--the favourable opinion too, so she insisted, of

their local doctor.

As they walked home, he startled her by saying that he should only have

three days in the valley.

"Three days!" She looked her remonstrance.

"You know the trial begins next week?"

Yes, she knew, but had understood that the pleadings were all ready, and

that a North-Western train would take him to London in six hours.

"I have to preach at St. Hilda's, Westminster," he said, with a shrug,

and a look of distaste.

Mary asked questions, and discovered that the sermon would no doubt be

made the opportunity for something like a demonstration; and that he

shrank from the thought of it.

She perceived, indeed, a certain general flagging of the merely combative

forces in him, not without dismay. Such moments of recoil are natural to

such men--half saints, half organizers. The immediate effect of her

perception of it was to call out something heroic and passionate in

herself. She was very sweet, and very young; there were eighteen years

between them; and yet in these very first hours of their engagement, he

felt her to be not only rest, but inspiration; not only sympathy, but

strength.

When they neared the little ivy-covered house, on their return home, Mary

broke from him. Her step on the gravel was heard by Catharine. She came

quickly to the door and stood awaiting them. Mary ran forward and threw

herself into the tender arms that drew her into the shadows of the

passage.

"Oh, mother! mother!--he does love you!" she said, with a rush of tears.

If Catharine's eyes also were dim, she only answered with a tender

mockery.

"Don't pretend that was all he said to you in these two hours!"

And still holding Mary, she turned, smiling, to Meynell, and let him

claim from her, for the first time, a son's greeting.

For three blissful days, did Meynell pitch his tent in Long Whindale.

Though the weather broke, and the familiar rain shrouded the fells, he

and Mary walked incessantly among them, exploring those first hours of

love, when every tone and touch is charged, for lovers, with the whole

meaning of the world. And in the evenings he sat between the two women in

the little cottage room, reading aloud Catharine's favourite poets; or in

the familiar talk, now gay now grave, of their new intimacy, disclosing

himself ever more fully, and rooting himself ever more firmly in their

hearts. His sudden alarm as to Catharine's health passed away, and Mary's

new terror with it. Scarcely a word was said of the troubles ahead. But

it was understood that Mary would be in London to hear him preach at St.

Hilda's.

On the last day of Meynell's visit, Catharine, greatly to her surprise,

received a letter from Hester Fox-Wilton.

It contained a breathless account of an evening spent in seeing

Oedipus Rex played by Mounet Sully at the Comédie Française. In this

half-sophisticated girl, the famous performance, traditional now through

two generations of playgoers, had clearly produced an emotion whereof the

expression in her letter greatly disquieted Catharine Elsmere. She felt

too--a little grimly--the humour of its address to herself.

"Tell me how to answer it, please," she said, handing it to Meynell with

a twitching lip. "It is a language I don't understand! And why did they

take her to such a play?"

Meynell shared her disquiet. For the Greek conception of a remorseless

fate, as it is forever shaped and embodied in the tale of Oedipus, had

led Hester apparently to a good deal of subsequent browsing in the

literature--the magazine articles at any rate--of French determinism; and

she rattled through some of her discoveries in this reckless letter:

"You talked to me so nicely, dear Mrs. Elsmere, that last evening at

Upcote. I know you want me--you want everybody--'to be good!'

"But 'being good' has nothing to do with us.

"How can it?--such creatures, such puppets as we are!

"Poor wretch, Oedipus! He never meant any one any harm--did he?--and

yet--you see!

"'_Apollo, friends, Apollo it was, that brought all these my woes, my

sore, sore woes!--to pass_.'

"Dear Mrs. Elsmere!--you can't think what a good doctrine it is after

all--how it steadies one! What chance have we against these blundering

gods?

"Nothing one can do makes any difference. It is, really very consoling if

you come to think of it; and it's no sort of good being angry with

Apollo!"

* * * * *

"Part nonsense, part bravado," said Catharine, raising clear eyes, with

half a smile in them, to Meynell. "But it makes one anxious."

His puckered brow showed his assent.

"As soon as the trial is over--within a fortnight certainly--I shall run

over to see them."

* * * * *

Meynell and Mary travelled to town together, and Mary was duly deposited

for a few days with some Kensington cousins.

On the night of their arrival--a Saturday--Meynell, not without some

hesitation, made an appearance at the Reformers' Club, which had been

recently organized as a London centre for the Movement, in Albemarle

Street.

It was no sooner known that he was in the building than a flutter ran

through the well-filled rooms. That very morning an article in the

_Modernist_ signed R. M. had sounded a note of war, so free, lofty, and

determined, that men were proud to be on Meynell's side in such a battle.

On the following Tuesday the Arches Trial was to begin. Meynell was to

defend himself; and the attention of the country would be fixed upon the

duel between him and the great orthodox counsel, Sir Wilfrid Marsh.

Men gathered quickly round him. Most of the six clergy who, with him, had

launched the first Modernist Manifesto, were present, in expectation of

the sermon on the morrow, and the trial of the following week. Chesham

and Darwen, his co-defendants in the Arches suit, with whom he had been

in constant correspondence throughout the winter, came to discuss a few

last points and understandings; Treherne, the dear old scholar in whose

house they had met to draw up the Manifesto, under the shadow of the

Cathedral, pressed his hand and launched a Latin quotation; Rollin, fat,

untidy and talkative as ever, could not refrain from "interviewing"

Meynell, for a weekly paper; while Derrick, the Socialist and poet,

talked to him in a low voice and with eyes that blazed, of certain

"brotherhoods" that had been spreading the Modernist faith, and Modernist

Sacraments among the slums of a great midland town.

And in the voices that spoke to him, and the eyes that met his, Meynell

could not but realize a wide and warm sympathy, an eagerness to make

amends--sometimes a half confessed compunction for a passing doubt.

He stood among them, haggard and worn, but steeped in a content and

gratitude that had more sources than they knew. And under the kindling of

their faith and their affection, his own hesitations passed away; his

will steeled itself to the tasks before him.

The following day will be long remembered in the annals of the Movement.

The famous church, crowded in every part with an audience representing

science, literature, politics, the best of English thought and English

social endeavour, was but the outward and visible sign of things inward

and spiritual.

"_Can these dry bones live_?"

As Meynell gave out the text, there were many who remembered the picture

of Oxford hanging in Newman's study at Edgbaston, and those same words

written below it.

"_Can these dry bones live_?"--So Newman had asked in despair, of his

beloved University, and of English religion, in the early years after he

had deserted Anglicanism for Rome. And now, more than half a century

afterward, the leader of a later religious movement asked the same

question on the eve of another contest which would either regenerate or

destroy the English Church. The impulse given by Newman and the

Tractarians had spent itself, though not without enormous and permanent

results within the life of the nation; and now it was the turn of that

Liberal reaction and recoil which had effaced Newman's work in Oxford,

yet had been itself wandering for years without a spiritual home. During

those years it had found its way through innumerable channels of the

national life as a fertilizing and redeeming force. It had transformed

education, law, science and history. Yet its own soul had hungered. And

now, thanks to that inner necessity which governs the spiritual progress

of men, the great Liberal Movement, enriched with a thousand conquests,

was sweeping back into the spiritual field; demanding its just share in

the National Church; and laying its treasures at the feet of a Christ,

unveiled, illuminated, by its own labour, by the concentrated and

passionate effort of a century of human intelligence.

Starting from this conception--the full citizen-right within the Church

of both Liberal and High Churchman--the first part of Meynell's sermon

became a moving appeal for religious freedom; freedom of development

and "variation," within organized Christianity itself. Simpler Creeds,

modernized tests, alternative forms, a "unity of the spirit in the bond

of peace,"--with these ideas the Modernist preacher built up the vision

of a Reformed Church, co-extensive with the nation, resting on a

democratic government, yet tenderly jealous of its ancient ceremonies, so

long as each man might interpret them "as he was able," and they were no

longer made a source of tyranny and exclusion.

Then, from the orthodox opponent in whose eyes the Modernist faith was a

mere beggarly remnant, Meynell turned to the sceptic for whom it was only

a modified superstition. An eloquent prelude, dealing with the

preconceptions, the modern philosophy and psychology which lie at the

root of religious thought to-day--and the rest of the sermon flowed on

into what all Christian eloquence must ultimately be, the simple

"preaching of Christ."

Amid the hush of the crowded church Meynell preached the Christ of our

day--just as Paul of Tarsus preached the Christ of a Hellenized Judaism

to the earliest converts; as St. Francis, in the Umbrian hills preached

the Lord of Poverty and Love; as the Methodist preachers among the

villages of the eighteenth century preached the democratic individualism

of the New Testament to the English nascent democracy.

In each case the form of the preaching depended on the knowledge and the

thought-world of the preacher. So with Meynell's Christ.

Not the phantom of a Hellenistic metaphysic; not the Redeemer and Judge

of a misunderstood Judaism; not the mere ethical prophet of a German

professorial theology; but the King of a spiritual kingdom, receiving

allegiance, and asking love, from the free consciences of men; repeating

forever in the ears of those in whom a Divine influence has prepared the

way, the melting and constraining message: "This do in remembrance of

me."

"'Of me--and of all the just, all the righteous, all the innocent, of all

the ages, in me--pleading through me--symbolized in me! Are you for

Man--or for the Beast that lurks in man? Are you for Chastity--or

Lust? Are you for Cruelty--or Love? Are you for Foulness or Beauty?

Choose!--choose this day.'

"The Christ who thus speaks to you and me, my brethren, is no longer

a man made God, a God made man. Those categories of thought, for us,

are past. But neither is he merely the crucified Galilean, the

Messianic prophet of the first century. For by a mysterious and unique

destiny--unique at least in degree--that life and death have become

Spirit and Idea. The Power behind the veil, the Spirit from whom issues

the world, has made of them a lyre, enchanted and immortal, through which

He breathes His music into men. The setting of the melody varies with the

generations, but the melody remains. And as we listen to it to-day,

expressed through the harmonies of that thought which is ourselves--blood

of our blood, life of our life--we are listening now, listening always,

as the disciples listened in Nazareth, to the God within us, the very God

who was 'in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.'

"Of that God, all life is in some sense, the sacramental expression. But

in the course of ages some sacraments and symbols of the divine are

approved and verified beyond others--immeasurably beyond others. This is

what has happened--and so far as we can see by the special will and

purpose of God--with the death-unto-life--with the Cross of Christ....

"The symbol of the Cross is concerned with our personal and profoundest

being. But the symbol of the Kingdom is social, collective--the power of

every reformer, every servant of men....

"Many thinkers," said the preacher, in his concluding passage, while all

eyes were fixed on the head sprinkled with gray, and the strong humanity

of the face--"many men, in all ages and civilizations have dreamed of a

City of God, a Kingdom of Righteousness, an Ideal State, and a Divine

Ruler. Jesus alone has made of that dream, history; has forced it upon,

and stamped it into history. The Messianic dream of Judaism--though

wrought of nobler tissue--it's not unlike similar dreams in other

religions; but in this it is unique, that it gave Jesus of Nazareth his

opportunity, and that from it has sprung the Christian Church. Jesus

accepted it with the heart of a child; he lived in it; he died for it;

and by means of it, his spiritual genius, his faithfulness unto death

transformed a world. He died indeed, overwhelmed; with the pathetic cry

of utter defeat upon his lips. And the leading races of mankind have

knelt ever since to the mighty spirit who dared not only to conceive

and found the Kingdom of God, but to think of himself as its Spiritual

King--by sheer divine right of service, of suffering, and of death! Only

through tribulation and woe--through the _peirasmos_ or sore trial of the

world--according to Messianic belief, could the Kingdom be realized, and

Messiah revealed. It was the marvellous conception of Jesus, inspired by

the ancient poetry and prophecy of his nation, that he might, as the

Suffering Servant, concentrate in himself the suffering due from his

race, and from the world, and by his death bring about--violently, "by

force"--the outpouring of the Spirit, the Resurrection, and the dawn of

the heavenly Kingdom. He went up to Jerusalem to die; he provoked his

death; he died. And from the Resurrection visions which followed

naturally on such a life and death, inspired by such conceptions, and

breathing them with such power into the souls of other men, arose the

Christian Church.

"The Parousia for which the Lord had looked, delayed. It delays still.

The scope and details of the Messianic dream itself mean nothing to us

any more.

"But its spirit is immortal. The vision of a kingdom of Heaven--a polity

of the soul, within, or superseding the earthly polity--once interfused

with man's thought and life, has proved to be imperishable, a thing that

cannot die.

"Only it must be realized afresh from age to age; embodied afresh in the

conceptions and the language of successive generations.

"And these developing embodiments and epiphanies of the kingdom can only

be brought into being by the method of Christ--that is to say, by

'_violence_'.

"Again and again has the kingdom 'suffered violence'--has been brought

fragmentarily into the world '_by force_'--by the only irresistible

force--that of suffering, of love, of self-renouncing faith.

"To that 'force' we, as religious Reformers, appeal.

"The parables of the mustard seed and the leaven do not express the

whole thought of Christ. When the work of preparation is over, still men

must brace themselves, as their Master did, to the last stroke of

'violence'--to a final effort of resolute, and, if need be, revolutionary

action--to the 'violence' that brings ideas to birth and shapes them into

deeds.

"It was to 'violence' of this sacred sort that the Christian Church owed

its beginning; and it is this same 'violence' that must, as the

generations rise and fall, constantly maintain it among men. To cut away

the old at need and graft in the new, requires the high courage and the

resolute hand of faith. Only so can the Christian Life renew itself; only

so can efficacy and movement return to powers exhausted or degenerate;

only so 'can these dry bones live!'"

Amid the throng as it moved outward into the bustle of Westminster,

Flaxman found himself rubbing shoulders with Edward Norham. Norham walked

with his eyes on the ground, smiling to himself.

"A little persecution!" he said, rubbing his hands, as he looked up--"and

how it would go!"

"Well--the persecution begins this week--in the Court of Arches."

"Persecution--nonsense! You mean 'propaganda.' I understand Meynell's

defence will proceed on totally new lines. He means to argue each point

on its merits?"

"Yes. The Voysey judgment gave him his cue. You will remember, Voysey was

attacked by the Lord Chancellor of the day--old Lord Hatherley--as a

'private clergyman,' who 'of his own mere will, not founding himself upon

any critical inquiry, but simply upon his own taste and judgment'

maintained certain heresies. Now Meynell, I imagine, will give his judges

enough of 'critical inquiry' before they have done with him!"

Norham shrugged his shoulders.

"All very well! Why did he sign the Articles?"

"He signed them at four-and-twenty!" said Flaxman hotly. "Will you

maintain that a system which insists upon a man's beliefs at forty-four

being identical with his beliefs at twenty-four is not condemned _ipso

facto_!"

"Oh I know what you say!--I know what you say!" cried Norham

good-humouredly. "We shall all be saying it in Parliament presently--Good

heavens! Well, I shall look into the court to-morrow, if I can possibly

find an hour, and hear Meynell fire away."

"As Home Secretary, you may get in!"--laughed Flaxman--"on no other

terms. There isn't a seat to be had--there hasn't been for weeks."

The trial came on. The three suits from the Markborough diocese took

precedence, and were to be followed by half a dozen others--test

cases--from different parts of England. But on the Markborough suits

everything turned. The Modernist defendants everywhere had practically

resolved on the same line of defence; on the same appeal from the mind of

the sixteenth century to the mind of the twentieth; from creeds and

formularies to history; from a dying to a living Church.

The chief counsel for the promoters, Sir Wilfrid Marsh, made a calm,

almost a conciliatory opening. He was a man of middle height, with a

large, clean-shaven face, a domed head and smooth straight hair, still

jetty black. He wore a look of quiet assurance and was clearly a man

of all the virtues; possessing a portly wife and a tribe of daughters.

His speech was marked in all its earlier sections by a studied liberality

and moderation. "I am not going to appeal, sir, for that judgment in the

promoters' favour which I confidently claim, on any bigoted or

obscurantist lines. The Church of England is a learned Church; she is

also a Church of wide liberties."

No slavish submission to the letter of the Articles on the Liturgy was

now demanded of any man. Subscription had been relaxed; the final

judgment in the _Essays and Reviews_ case had given a latitude in the

interpretation of Scripture, of which, as many recent books showed, the

clergy--"I refer now to men of unquestioned orthodoxy"--had taken

reasonable advantage; prayer-book revision "within the limits of the

faith," if constantly retarded by the divisions of the faithful, was

still probable; both High Churchmen and Broad Churchmen--here an aside

dropped out, "so far as Broad Churchmen still exist!"--are necessary to

the Church.

But there are limits. "Critical inquiry, sir, if you will--reasonable

liberty, within the limits of our formularies and a man's ordination

vow--by all means!

"But certain things are _vital_! With certain fundamental beliefs let no

one suppose that either the bishops, or convocation, or these Church

courts, or Parliament, or what the defendants are pleased to call the

nation" [one must imagine the fine gesture of a sweeping hand] "can

meddle." The _animus imponentis_ is not that of the Edwardian or

Elizabethan legislation, it is not that of the Bishops! it is that of the

Christian Church itself!--handing down the _deposition fidei_ from the

earliest to the latest times.

"_The Creeds, sir, are vital_! Put aside Homilies, Articles, the

judgments and precedents of the Church Courts--all these are, in this

struggle, beside the mark. _Concentrate on the Creeds_! Let us examine

what the defendants in these suits have made of the Creeds of

Christendom."

The evidence was plain. Regarded as historical statement, the defendants

had dealt drastically and destructively with the Creeds of Christendom;

no less than with the authority of "Scripture," understanding "authority"

in any technical sense.

It was indeed the chief Modernist contention, as the orator showed, that

formal creeds were mere "landmarks in the Church's life,"

crystallizations of thought, that were no sooner formed than they became

subject to the play, both dissolvent and regenerating, of the Christian

consciousness.

"And so you come to that inconceivable entity, a Church without a

creed--a mere chaos of private opinion, where each man is a law unto

himself."

On this theme, Sir Wilfrid--who was a man of singularly strong private

opinions, of all kinds and on all subjects--spoke for a whole day; from

the rising almost to the going down of the sun.

At the end of it Canon Dornal and a barrister friend, a devout Churchman,

walked back toward the Temple along the Embankment.

The walk was very silent, until midway the barrister said abruptly--

"Is it any plainer to you now, than when Sir Wilfrid began, what

authority--if any--there is in the English Church; or what limits--if

any--there are to private judgment within it?"

Dornal hesitated.

"My answer, of course, is Sir Wilfrid's. We have the Creeds."

They walked on in silence a moment. Then the first speaker said:

"A generation ago would you not have said--what also Sir Wilfrid

carefully avoided saying--'We have the Scriptures.'"

"Perhaps," said Dornal despondently.

"And as to the Creeds," the other resumed, after another pause--"Do you

think that one per cent of the Christians that you and I know believe in

the Descent into Hell, or the Resurrection of the Body?"

Dornal made no reply.

Cyril Fenton also walked home with a young priest just ordained. Both

were extremely dissatisfied with the later portions of Sir Wilfrid's

speech, which had seemed to them tainted in several passages with

Erastian complacency toward the State. Parliament especially, and a

possible intervention of Parliament, ought never to have been so much as

mentioned--even for denunciation--in an ecclesiastical court.

"_Parliament!"_ cried Fenton, coming to a sudden stop beside the water in

St. James' Park, his eyes afire, "What is Parliament but the lay synod of

the Church of England!"

During the three days of Sir Wilfrid's speech, Meynell took many notes,

and he became perforce very familiar with some of the nearer faces in the

audience day after day; with the Bishop of S----, lank and long-jawed,

with reddish hair turning to gray, a deprecating manner in society, but

in the pulpit a second Warburton for truculence and fire; the Bishop of

D----, beloved, ugly, short-sighted, the purest and humblest soul alive;

learned, mystical, poetical, in much sympathy with the Modernists, yet

deterred by the dread of civil war within the Church, a master of the Old

Latin Versions, and too apt to address schoolgirls on the charms of

textual criticism; the Bishop of F----, courtly, peevish and distrusted;

the Dean of Markborough, with the green shade over his eyes, and fretful

complaint on his lips of the "infection" generated by every Modernist

incumbent; and near him, Professor Vetch, with yet another divinity

professor beside him, a young man, short and slight, with roving,

grasshopper eyes.

The temperature of Sir Wilfrid's address rose day by day, and the case

for the prosecution closed thunderously in a fierce onslaught on the

ethics of the Modernist position, and on the personal honesty and

veracity of each and every Modernist holding office in the Anglican

Church, claiming sentences of immediate deprivation against the

defendants, of their vicarages and incumbencies, and of all profits and

benefits derived therefrom "unless within a week from this day they (the

defendants) should expressly and unreservedly retract the several

errors in which they have so offended."

The court broke up in a clamour of excitement and discussion, with crowds

of country parishioners standing outside to greet the three incriminated

priests as they came out.

The following morning Meynell rose. And for one brilliant week, his

defence of the Modernist position held the attention of England.

On the fourth or fifth day of his speech, the white-haired Bishop of

Dunchester, against whom proceedings had just been taken in the

Archbishop's Court, said to his son:

"Herbert, just before I was born there were two great religious leaders

in England--Newman and Arnold of Rugby. Arnold died prematurely, at

the height of bodily and spiritual vigour; Newman lived to the age of

eighty-nine, and to be a Cardinal of the Roman Church. His Anglican

influence, continued, modified, distributed by the High Church movement,

has lasted till now. To-day we have been listening again, as it were, to

the voice of Arnold, the great leader whom the Liberals lost in '42,

Arnold was a devoutly orthodox believer, snatched from life in the very

birth-hour of that New Learning of which we claim to be the children. But

a church of free men, coextensive with the nation, gathering into one

fold every English man, woman and child, that was Arnold's dream, just as

it is Meynell's.... And yet though the voice, the large heart, the

fearless mind, and the broad sympathies were Arnold's, some of the

governing ideas were Newman's. As I listened, I seemed"--the old man's

look glowed suddenly--"to see the two great leaders, the two foes of a

century ago, standing side by side, twin brethren in a new battle,

growing out of the old, with a great mingled host behind them."

Each day the court was crowded, and though Meynell seemed to be

addressing his judges, he was in truth speaking quite as consciously to a

sweet woman's face in a far corner of the crowded hall. Mary went into

the long wrestle with him, as it were, and lived through every moment of

it at his side. Then in the evening there were half hours of utter

silence, when he would sit with her hands in his, just gathering strength

for the morrow.

Six days of Meynell's speech were over. On the seventh the Court opened

amid the buzz of excitement and alarm. The chief defendant in the suit

was not present, and had sent--so counsel whispered to each other--a

hurried note to the judge to the effect that he should be absent

through the whole remainder of the trial owing to "urgent private

business."

In a few more hours it was known that Meynell had left England, and men

on both sides looked at each other in dismay.

Meanwhile Mary had forwarded to her mother a note written late at night,

in anguish of soul:

"Alice wires to me to-night that Hester has disappeared--without the

smallest trace. But she believes she is with Meryon. I go to Paris

to-night--Oh, my own, pray that I may find her!--R. M."

CHAPTER XXII

The mildness of the winter had passed away. A bleak February afternoon

lay heavy on Long Whindale. A strong and bitter wind from the north blew

down the valley with occasional spits and snatches of snow, not enough as

yet to whiten the heights, but prophesying a wild night and a heavy fall.

The blasts in the desolate upper reach of the dale were so fierce that a

shepherd on the path leading over the pass to Marly Head could scarcely

hold himself upright against them. Tempestuous sounds filled all the

upper and the lower air. From the high ridges came deep reverberating

notes, a roaring in the wind; while the trees along the stream sent forth

a shriller voice, as they whistled and creaked and tossed in the eddying

gusts. Cold gray clouds were beating from the north, hanging now over the

cliffs on the western side, now over the bare screes and steep slopes of

the northern and eastern walls. Gray or inky black, the sharp edges of

the rocks cut into the gloomy sky; while on the floor of the valley,

blanched grass and winding stream seemed alike to fly scourged before the

persecuting wind.

A trap--Westmoreland calls it a car--a kind of box on wheels, was

approaching the head of the dale from the direction of Whinborough. It

stopped at the foot of the steep and narrow lane leading to Burwood, and

a young lady got out.

"You're sure that's Burwood?" she said, pointing to the house partially

visible at the end of the lane.

The driver answered in the affirmative.

"Where Mrs. Elsmere lives?"

"Aye, for sure." The man as he spoke looked curiously at the lady he had

brought from Whinborough station. She was quite a young girl he guessed,

and a handsome one. But there seemed to be something queer about her. She

looked so tumbled and tired.

Hester Fox-Wilton took out her purse, and paid him with an uncertain

hand, one or more of the shillings falling on the road, where the driver

and she groped for them. Then she raised the small bag she had brought

with her in the car, and turned away.

"Good day to yer, miss," said the man as he mounted the box. She made no

reply. After he had turned his horse and started on the return journey to

Whinborough, he looked back once or twice. But the high walls of the lane

hid the lady from him.

Hester, however, did not go very far up the lane. She sank down very soon

on a jutting stone beneath the left-hand wall, with her bag beside her,

and sat there looking at the little house. It was a pleasant, home-like

place, even on this bitter afternoon. In one of the windows was a glow of

firelight; white muslin curtains everywhere gave it a dainty, refined

look; and it stood picturesquely within the shelter of its trees, and of

the yew hedge which encircled the garden.

Yet Hester shivered as she looked at it. She was very imperfectly clothed

for such an afternoon, in a serge jacket and skirt supplemented by a

small fur collarette, which she drew closer round her neck from time to

time, as though in a vain effort to get warm. But she was not conscious

of doing so, nor of the cold as cold. All her bodily sensations were

miserable and uncomfortable. But she was only actively aware of the

thoughts racing through her mind.

There they were, within a stone's throw of her--Mary and Mrs. Elsmere--in

the warm, cosy little house, without an idea that she, Hester, the

wretched, disgraced Hester, was sitting in the lane so close to them. And

yet they were perhaps thinking of her--they must have often thought about

her in the last fortnight. Mrs. Elsmere must of course have been sorry.

Good people were always sorry when such things happened. And Mary?--who

was eight years older--_older!_ than this girl of eighteen who sat there,

sickened by life, conscious of a dead wall of catastrophe drawn between

her and the future.

Should she go to them? Should she open their door and say--"Here I

am!--Horrible things have happened. No decent person will ever know me or

speak to me again. But you said--you'd help me--if I wanted it.

Perhaps it was a lie--like all the rest?"

Then as the reddened eyelids fell with sheer fatigue, there rose on the

inward sight the vision of Catharine Elsmere's face--its purity, its

calm, its motherliness. For a moment it drew, it touched, it gave

courage. And then the terrible sense of things irreparable, grim matters

of fact not to be dreamed or thought away, rushed in and swept the

clinging, shipwrecked creature from the foothold she had almost reached.

She rose hastily.

"I can't! They don't want to see me--they've done with me. Or perhaps

they'll cry--they'll pray with me, and I can't stand that! Why did I ever

come? Where on earth shall I go?"

And she looked round her in petulant despair, angry with herself for

having done this foolish thing, angry with the loneliness and barrenness

of the valley, where no inn opened doors of shelter for such as she,

angry with the advancing gloom, and with the bitter wind that teased and

stung her.

A little way up the lane she saw a small gate that led into the Elsmeres'

garden. She took her bag, and opening the gate, she placed it inside.

Then she ran down the lane, drawing her fur round her, and shivering with

cold.

"I'll think a bit--" she said to herself--"I'll think what to say.

Perhaps I'll come back soon."

When she reached the main road again, she looked uncertainly to right and

left. Which way? The thought of the long dreary road back to Whinborough

repelled her. She turned toward the head of the valley. Perhaps she might

find a house which would take her in. The driver had said there was a

farm which let lodgings in the summer. She had money--some pounds at any

rate; that was all right. And she was not hungry. She had arrived at a

junction station five miles from Whinborough by a night train. At six

o'clock in the morning she had found herself turned out of the express,

with no train to take her on to Whinborough. But there was a station

hotel, and she had engaged a room and ordered a fire. There she had

thrown herself down without undressing on the bed, and had slept heavily

for four or five hours. Then she had had some breakfast, and had taken

a midday train to Whinborough, and a trap to Long Whindale.

She had travelled straight from Nice without stopping. She would not let

herself think now as she hurried along the lonely road what it was she

had fled from, what it was that had befallen. The slightest glimpse into

this past made her begin to sob, she put it away from her with all her

strength. But she had had, of course, to decide where she should go, with

whom she should take refuge.

Not with Uncle Richard, whom she had deceived and defied. Not with "Aunt

Alice." No sooner did the vision of that delicate withered face, that

slender form come before her, than it brought with it terrible fancies.

Her conduct had probably killed "Aunt Alice." She did not want to think

about her.

But Mrs. Elsmere knew all about bad men, and girls who got into trouble.

She, Hester, knew, from a few things she had heard people say--things

that no one supposed she had heard--that Mrs. Elsmere had given years of

her life, and sacrificed her health, to "rescue" work. The rescue of

girls from such men as Philip? How could they be rescued?--when--

All that was nonsense. But the face, the eyes--the shining, loving eyes,

the motherly arms--yes, those, Hester confessed to herself, she had

thirsted for. They had brought her all the way from Nice to this northern

valley--this bleak, forbidding country. She shivered again from head to

foot, as she made her way painfully against the wind.

Yet now she was flying even from Catharine Elsmere; even from those

tender eyes that haunted her.

The road turned toward a bridge, and on the other side of the bridge

degenerated into a rough and stony bridle path, giving access to two gray

farms beneath the western fell. On the near side of the bridge the

road became a cart-track leading to the far end of the dale.

Hester paused irresolute on the bridge, and looked back toward Burwood. A

light appeared in what was no doubt the sitting-room window. A lamp

perhaps that, in view of the premature darkening of the afternoon by the

heavy storm-clouds from the north, a servant had just brought in. Hester

watched it in a kind of panic, foreseeing the moment when the curtains

would be drawn and the light shut out from her. She thought of the little

room within, the warm firelight, Mary with her beautiful hair--and Mrs.

Elsmere. They were perhaps working and reading--as though that were all

there were to do and think about in the world! No, no! after all they

couldn't be very peaceful--or very cheerful. Mary was engaged to Uncle

Richard now; and Uncle Richard must be pretty miserable.

The exhausted girl nearly turned back toward that light. Then a hand came

quietly and shut it out. The curtains were drawn. Nothing now to be seen

of the little house but its dim outlines in the oncoming twilight, the

smoke blown about its roof, and a faint gleam from a side-window, perhaps

the kitchen.

Suddenly, a thought, a wild, attacking thought, leapt out upon her, and

held her there motionless, in the winding, wintry lane.

When had she sent that telegram to Upcote? If she could only remember!

The events of the preceding forty-eight hours seemed to be all confused

in one mad flux of misery. Was it _possible_ that they too could be

Here--Uncle Richard, and "Aunt Alice?" She had said something about Mrs.

Elsmere in her telegram--she could not recollect what. That had been

meant to comfort them, and yet to keep them away, to make them leave

her to her own plans. But supposing, instead, its effect had been to

bring them here at once, in pursuit of her?

She hurried forward, sobbing dry sobs of terror as though she already

heard their steps behind her. What was she afraid of? Simply their

love!--simply their sorrow! She had broken their hearts; and what could

she say to them?

The recollection of all her cruelty to "Aunt Alice" in Paris--her

neglect, her scorn, her secret, unjust anger with those who had kept from

her the facts of her birth--seemed to rise up between her and all ideas

of hope and help. Oh, of course they would be kind to her!--they would

forgive her--but--but she couldn't bear it! Impatience with the very

scene of wailing and forgiveness she foresaw, as of something utterly

futile and vain, swept through the quivering nerves.

"And it can never be undone!" she said to herself roughly, as though she

were throwing the words in some one's face. "It can never, _never_ be

undone! What's the good of talking?"

So the only alternative was to wander a while longer into these clouds

and storms that were beginning to beat down from the pass through the

darkness of the valley; to try and think things out; to find some shelter

for the night; then to go away again--somewhere. She was conscious now of

a first driving of sleet in her face; but it only lasted for a few

minutes. Then it ceased; and a strange gleam swept over the valley--a

livid storm-light from the west, which blanched all the withered grass

beside her, and seemed to shoot along the course of the stream as she

toiled up the rocky path beside it.

What a country, what a sky! Her young body was conscious of an angry

revolt against it, against the northern cold and dreariness; her body,

which still kept as it were the physical memory of sun, and blue sea, and

orange trees, of the shadow of olives on a thin grass, of the scent of

orange blossom on the broken twigs that some one was putting into her

hand.

Another fit of shuddering repulsion made her quicken her pace, as though,

again, she were escaping from pursuit. Suddenly, at a bend in the path,

she came on a shepherd and his flock. The shepherd, an old white-haired

man, was seated on a rock, staff in hand, watching his dog collect the

sheep from the rocky slope on which they were scattered.

At sight of Hester, the old man started and stared. Her fair hair

escaping in many directions from the control of combs and hairpins, and

the pale lovely face in the midst of it, shone in the stormy gleam that

filled the basin of the hills. Her fashionable hat and dress amazed him.

Who could she be?

She too stopped to look at him, and at his dog. The mere neighbourhood of

a living being brought a kind of comfort.

"It's going to snow--" she said, as she stood beside him, surprised by

the sound of her own voice amid the roar of the wind.

"Aye--it's onding o' snaw--" said the shepherd, his shrewd blue eyes

travelling over her face and form. "An' it'll mappen be a rough night."

"Are you taking your sheep into shelter?"

He pointed to a half-ruined fold, with three sycamores beside it, a

stone's throw away. The gate of it was open, and the dog was gradually

chasing the sheep within it.

"I doan't like leavin' 'em on t' fells this bitter weather. I'm afraid

for t' ewes. It's too cauld for 'em. They'll be for droppin' their lambs

too soon if this wind goes on. It juist taks t' strength out on 'em, doos

the wind."

"Do you think it's going to snow a great deal?"

The old man looked round at the clouds and the mountains; at the

powdering of snow that had already whitened the heights.

"It'll be more'n a bit!" he said cautiously. "I dessay we'll have to be

gettin' men to open t' roads to-morrow."

"Does it often block the roads?"

"Aye, yance or twice i' t' winter. An' ye can't let 'em bide. What's ter

happen ter foak as want the doctor?"

"Did you ever know people lost on these hills?" asked the girl, looking

into the blackness ahead of them. Her shrill, slight voice rang out in

sharp contrast to the broad gutturals of his Westmoreland speech.

"Aye, missy--I've known two men lost on t' fells sin I wor a lad."

"Were they shepherds, like you?"

"Noa, missy--they wor tramps. Theer's mony a fellow cooms by this way i'

th' bad weather to Pen'rth, rather than face Shap fells. They say it's

betther walkin'. But when it's varra bad, we doan't let 'em go on--noa,

it's not safe. Theer was a mon lost on t' fells nine year ago coom

February. He wor an owd mon, and blind o' yan eye. He'd lost the toother,

dippin' sheep."

"How could he do that?" Hester asked indifferently, still staring ahead

into the advancing storm, and trembling with cold from head to foot.

"Why, sum o' the dippin' stuff got into yan eye, and blinded him. It was

my son, gooin afther th' lambs i' the snaw, as found him. He heard

summat--a voice like a lile child cryin'--an he scratted aboot, an

dragged th' owd man out. He worn't deed then, but he died next mornin'.

An t' doctor said as he'd fair broken his heart i' th' storm--not in a

figure o' speach yo unnerstan--but juist th' plain truth."

The old man rose. The sheep had all been folded. He called to his dog,

and went to shut the gate. Then, still curiously eyeing Hester, he came

back, followed by his dog, to the place where she stood, listlessly

watching.