The Case of Richard Meynell

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

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.