The Case of Richard Meynell

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Meynell looked rather scared.

"Not much, I hope!"

"Enough for gowns!—and—and a little more."

"I prefer to buy my wife's gowns—I will!" said Meynell with energy. "Promise me, darling, to put all your money into a drawer—or a money-box. Then when we want something really amusing—a cathedral—or a yacht—we'll take it out."

So they laughed together, he all the while holding her close crushed against him, and she deafened almost by the warm beating of a man's heart beneath her cheek.

And presently silence came, a silence in which one of the rare ecstasies of life came upon them and snatched them to the third heaven. From the fold of the hill in which they sat, sheltered both by the fell itself, and by the encircling hollies, they overlooked a branching dale, half veiled, and half revealed by sunny cloud. Above the western fells they had just crossed, hung towers and domes of white cumulus, beneath which a pearly sunshine slipped through upon the broad fell-side, making of it one wide sunlit pleasance, dyed in the red and orange of the withered fern, and dotted with black holly and juniper. Round the head of the dale the curtain of cloud hung thicker, save where one superb crag tore it asunder, falling sheer into the green gentleness of the fields. In the silence, all the voices of nature spoke; the rising wind, which flung itself against the hill-slopes at their feet; the insistent flow of the river, descending from the reservoirs far away; and the sharp chatter of the little beck leaping at their side from stone to stone. Passionately, in Meynell's heart the "buried life" awoke, which only love can free from the cavern where it lies, and bring into the full energy of day.

"One goes on talking—preaching—babbling—about love," he said to her; "what else is there to preach about? If love is not the key to life, then there is no key, and no man need preach any more. Only, my Amor has been till now a stern God! He has in his hands!—I know it!—all the noblest rewards and ecstasies of life; but so far, I have seen him wring them out of horror, or pain. The most heavenly things I have ever seen have been the things of suffering. I think of a poor fellow dying in the pit and trying to give me his last message to his wife; of a mother fading out of life, still clasping her babes, with hands twisted almost out of human shape by hard work; or a little lad—" his voice dropped—"only last week!—who saved his worthless brother's life by giving him warning of some escaping trucks, and was crushed himself. 'I couldn't help it, sir!'—apologizing to me and the foreman, as we knelt by him!—'I knew Jim had the drink in him.' In all these visions, Love was divine—but awful! And here!—here!—I see his wings outspread upon that mountain-side; he comes clothed, not in agony, but in this golden peace—this beauty—this wild air; he lays your head upon my breast!"

Or again:

"There is a new philosophy which has possessed me for months; the thought of a great man, which seizes upon us dull lesser creatures, and seems to give us, for a time at least, new eyes and ears, as though, like Melampus, we had caught the hidden language of the world! It rests on the notion of the endless creativeness and freedom of life. It is the negation of all fate, all predestination. Nothing foreknown, nothing predestined! No necessity—no anangké—darling!—either in the world process, or the mind of God, that you and I should sit here to-day, heart to heart! It was left for our wills to do, our hearts to conceive, God lending us the world, so to speak, to work on! All our past cutting into—carving out—this present; all our past alive in the present; as all this present shall be alive in the future. There is no 'iron law' for life and will, beloved—they create, they are the masters, they are forever new. All the same!"—his tone changed—"I believe firmly that this rock knew from all eternity that you and I should sit here to-day!"

Presently, Mary disengaged herself. Her hat was not what it had been; her hair had escaped its bounds, and must be rigorously put to rights. She sat there flushed and bareheaded, her hands working; while Meynell's eyes devoured her.