The Case of Richard Meynell

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

The library door opened again, and Meynell disappeared—ceremoniously escorted to the threshold by the Professor. When that gentleman was seated again, the Dean addressed the meeting.

"A most unsatisfactory interview! There is nothing for it, I fear, but to send in our report unaltered to the Bishop. I must therefore ask you to append your signatures."

All signed, and the meeting broke up.

"Do you know at all when the case is likely to come on?" said Dornal to the Dean.

"Hardly before November. The Letters of Request are ready. Then after the Arches will come the appeal to the Privy Council. The whole thing may take some time."

"You see the wild talk in some of the papers this morning," said the Professor, interposing, "about a national appeal to Parliament to 'bring the Articles of the Church of England into accordance with modern knowledge.' If there is any truth in it, there may be an Armageddon before us."

Dornal looked at him with distaste. The speaker's light tone, the note of relish in it, as of one delighting in the drama of life, revolted him.

On coming out of the Cathedral Library, Dornal walked across to the Cathedral and entered. He found his way to a little chapel of St. Oswald on the north side, where he was often wont to sit or kneel for ten minutes' quiet in a busy day. As he passed the north transept he saw a figure sitting motionless in the shadow, and realized that it was Meynell.

The silence of the great Cathedral closed round him. He was conscious of nothing but his own personality, and, as it seemed, of Meynell's. They two seemed to be alone together in a world outside the living world. Dornal could not define it, save that it was a world of reconciled enmities and contradictions. The sense of it alternated with a disagreeable recollection of the table in the Library and the men sitting round it, especially the cherubic face of the Professor; the thought also of the long, signed document which reported the "heresy" of Meynell.

He had been quite right to sign it. His soul went out in a passionate adhesion to the beliefs on which his own life was built. Yet still the strange reconciling sense flowed in and round him, like the washing of a pure stream. He was certain that the Eternal Word had been made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, had died and risen, and been exalted; that the Church was now the mysterious channel of His risen life. He must, in mere obedience and loyalty, do battle for that certainty—guard it as the most precious thing in life for those that should come after. Nevertheless he was conscious that there was in him none of the righteous anger, none of the moral condemnation, that his father or grandfather might have felt in the same case. As far as feeling went, nothing divided him from Meynell. They two across the commission table—as accuser and accused—had recognized, each in the other, the man of faith. The same forces played on both, mysteriously linking them, as the same sea links the headland which throws back its waves with the harbour which receives them.