The Case of Richard Meynell

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

"Comfort her—help her—make her tell me what's the matter."

"You think she's unhappy?"

Mary propped her chin on her hand, and looked into the fire.

"I wonder whether she's ever had any real joy—a week's—a day's—happiness—in her life?"

[Illustration: "'I wonder whether she's ever had any real joy—a week's—a day's—happiness—in her life?'">[

She said it musingly but intensely. Catharine did not know how to answer her. All the day long, and a good deal of the night, she had been debating with herself what to do—toward Mary. Mary was no longer a child. She was a woman, of nearly six and twenty, strong in character, and accustomed of late to go with her mother into many of the dark places of London life. The betrayal—which could not be hidden from her—of a young servant girl in their employ, the year before, and the fierce tenderness with which Mary had thrown herself into the saving of the girl and her child, had brought about—Catharine knew it—a great deepening and overshadowing of her youth. Catharine had in some ways regretted it bitterly; for she belonged to that older generation which believed—and were amply justified in believing—that it is well for the young to be ignorant, so long as they can be ignorant, of the ugly and tragic things of sex. It was not that her Mary seemed to her in the smallest degree besmirched by the experience she had passed through; that any bloom had been shaken from the flower. Far from it. It was rather that some touch of careless joy was gone forever from her child's life; and how that may hurt a mother, only those know who have wept in secret hours over the first ebbing of youth in a young face.

So that she received Mary's outburst in silence. For she said to herself that she could have no right to reveal Alice Puttenham's secret, even to Mary. That cruel tongues should at that moment be making free with it burnt like a constant smart in Catharine's mind. Was the poor thing herself aware of it?—could it be kept from her? If not, Mary must know—would know—sooner or later. "But for me to tell her without permission"—thought Catharine firmly—"would not be right—or just. Besides, I know nothing—directly."

As to the other and profounder difficulty involved, Catharine wavered perpetually between two different poles of feeling. The incidents of the preceding weeks had made it plain that her resistance to Meynell's influence with Mary had strangely and suddenly broken down. Owing to an experience of which she had not yet spoken to Mary, her inner will had given way. She saw with painful clearness what was coming; she was blind to none of the signs of advancing love; and she felt herself powerless. An intimation had been given her—so it seemed to her—to which she submitted. Her submission had cost her tears often, at night, when there was no one to see. And yet it had brought her also a strange happiness—like all such yieldings of soul.

But if she had yielded, if there was in her a reluctant practical certainty that Mary would some day be Meynell's wife, then her conscience, which was that of a woman who had passionately loved her husband, began to ask: "Ought she not to be standing by him in this trouble? If we keep it all from her, and he suffers and perhaps breaks down, when she might have sustained him, will she not reproach us? Should I not have bitterly reproached any one who had kept me from helping Robert in such a case?"

A state of mind, it will be seen, into which there entered not a trace of ordinary calculations. It did not occur to her that Mary might be injured in the world's eyes by publicly linking herself with a man under a cloud. Catharine, whose temptation to "scruple" in the religious sense was constant and tormenting, who recoiled in horror from what to others were the merest venial offences, in this connection asked one thing only. Where Barron had argued that an unbeliever must necessarily have a carnal mind, Catharine had simply assured herself at once by an unfailing instinct that the mind was noble and the temper pure. In those matters she was not to be deceived; she knew.