The Case of Richard Meynell

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

And now—by ill-fortune—a tired and suffering woman had no sooner found refuge and rest in the solitude of Forkéd Pond than, thanks partly to the Flaxmans' new friendship for Upcote's revolutionary parson, and partly to all the public signs, not to be escaped, of the commotion brewing in the diocese, and in England generally, the same agitations, the same troubles which had destroyed her happiness and peace of mind in the past, came clattering about her again.

Every one talked of them; every one took a passionate concern in them; the newspapers were full of them. The personality of Meynell, or that of the Bishop; the characters and motives of his opponents; the chances of the struggle—and the points on which it turned; even in the little solitary house between the waters Catharine could not escape them. The Bishop, too, was an old friend; before his promotion he had been the incumbent of a London parish in which Catharine had worked. She was no sooner settled at Forkéd Pond than he came to see her; and what more natural than he should speak of the anxieties weighing upon him to one so able to feel for them?

Then!—the first involuntary signs of Mary's interest in, Mary's sympathy with, the offender! In Catharine's mind a thousand latent terrors sprang at once to life. For a time—some weeks—she had succeeded in checking all developments. Invitations were refused; meetings were avoided. But gradually the situation changed. Points of contact began inevitably to multiply between Mary and the disturber of Christ's peace in Upcote. Mary's growing friendship for Alice Puttenham, her chance encounters with Meynell there, or in the village, or in the Flaxmans' drawing-room, were all distasteful and unwelcome to Catharine Elsmere. At least her Robert had sacrificed himself—had done the honest and honourable thing. But this man—wounding the Church from within—using the opportunities of the Church for the destruction of the Church—who would make excuses for such a combatant?

And the more keenly she became aware of the widening gulf between her thoughts and Mary's—of Mary's involuntary, instinctive sympathy with the enemy—the greater was her alarm.

For the first time in all her strenuous, self-devoted life she would sometimes make much of her physical weakness in these summer days, so as to keep Mary with her, to prevent her from becoming more closely acquainted with Meynell and Meynell's ideas. And in fact this new anxiety interfered with her recovery; she had only to let herself be ill, and ill most genuinely she was.

Mary understood it all, and submitted. Her mother's fears were indeed amply justified! Mary's secret mind was becoming absorbed, from a distance, in Meynell's campaign; Meynell's personality, through all hindrance and difficulty—nay, perhaps, because of them—was gradually seizing upon and mastering her own; and processes of thought that, so long as she and her mother were, so to speak, alone in the world together, were still immature and potential, grew apace. The woods and glades of Maudeley, the village street, the field paths, began to be for her places of magic, whence at any moment might spring flowers of joy known to her alone. To see him pass at a distance, to come across him in a miner's cottage, or in Miss Puttenham's drawing-room—these rare occasions were to her the events of the summer weeks. Nevertheless, when September arrived, she had long since forbidden herself to hope for anything more.

Meanwhile, Rose Flaxman was the only person who ever ventured to feel and show the irritation of the natural woman toward her sister's idiosyncrasies.

"Do for heaven's sake stop her reading these books!" she said impatiently one evening to Mary, when she had taken leave of Catharine, and her niece was strolling back with her toward Maudeley.

"What books?"

"Why, lives of bishops and deans and that kind of thing! I never come but I find a pile of them beside her. It should be made absolutely illegal to write the life of a clergyman! My dear, your mother would be well in a week if we could only stop it and put her on a course of Gaboriau!"