The Case of Richard Meynell

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

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.