The Case of Richard Meynell

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Had he after all tricked and ruined her? Yet as her consciousness framed the question in the conventional phrases familiar to her through newspapers and novels, she hardly knew what they meant, this child of eighteen, who in three short weeks had been thrust through the fire of an experience on which she had never had time to reflect. Flattered vanity, and excitement, leading up almost from the first day to instinctive and fierce revolt—intervals of acquiescence, of wild determination to be happy, drowned in fresh rebellions of soul and sense—through these alternations the hours had rushed on, culminating in her furtive and sudden escape from the man of whom she was now in mad fear—her blind flight for "home."

The commonness of her case, the absence of any romantic or poetic element in it—it was that which galled, which degraded her in her own eyes. Only three weeks since she had felt that entire and arrogant belief in herself, in her power over her own life and Philip's, on which she now looked back as merely ludicrous!—inexplicable in a girl of the most ordinary intelligence. What power had girls over men?—such men as Philip Meryon?

Her vanity was bleeding to death—and her life with it. Since the revelation of her birth, she seemed to have been blindly struggling to regain her own footing in the world—the kind of footing she was determined to have. Power and excitement; not to be pitied, but to be followed, wooed, adored; not to be forced on the second and third bests of the world, but to have the "chief seat," the daintest morsel, the beau rôle always—had not this been her instinctive, unvarying demand on life? And now? If she were indeed married, she was tied to a man who neither loved her, nor could bring her any position in the world; who was penniless, and had only entrapped her that he might thereby get some money out of her relations; who, living or dead, would be a disgrace to her, standing irrevocably between her and any kind of honour or importance in society.

And if he had deceived her, and she were not his wife—she would be free indeed; but what would her freedom matter to her? What decent man would ever love her now—marry her—set her at his side? At eighteen—eighteen! all those chances were over for her. It was so strange that she could have laughed at her own thoughts; and yet at the same time it was so ghastly true! No need now to invent a half-sincere chatter about "Fate." She felt herself in miserable truth the mere feeble mouse wherewith the great cat Fate was playing.

And yet—after all—she herself had done it!—by her own sheer madness. She seemed to see Aunt Alice's plaintive face, the eyes that followed her, the lip that trembled when she said an unkind or wanton thing; she heard again the phrases of Uncle Richard's weekly letters, humorous, tender phrases, with here and there an occasional note of austerity, or warning.

Oh yes—she had done it—she had ruined herself.

She felt the tears running over her cheeks, mingling with the snow as it pelted in her face. Suddenly she realized how cold she was, how soaked. She must—must go back to shelter—to human faces—to kind hands. She put out her own, groping helplessly—and rose to her feet.

But the darkness was now much advanced, and the great snowstorm of the night had begun. She could not see the path below her at all, and only some twenty yards of its course above her. In the whirling gloom and in the fury of the wind, although she turned to descend the path, her courage suddenly failed her. She remembered a stream she had crossed on a little footbridge with a rail; could she ever see to recross it again?—above the greedy tumult of the water? Peering upward it seemed to her that she saw something like walls in front of her—perhaps another sheepfold? That would give her shelter for a little, and perhaps the snow would stop—perhaps it was only a shower. She struggled on, and up, and found indeed some fragments of walls, beside the path, one of the many abandoned places among the Westmoreland fells that testify to the closer settlement of the dales in earlier centuries.

And just as she clambered within them, the clouds sweeping along the fell-side lifted and parted for the last time, and she caught a glimpse of a wide, featureless world, the desolate top of the fells, void of shelter or landmark, save that straight across it, from gloom to gloom, there ran a straight white thing—a ghostly and forsaken track. The Roman road, no doubt, of which the shepherd had spoken. And a vision sprang into her mind of Roman soldiers tramping along it, helmeted and speared, their heads bent against these northern storms—shivering like herself. She gazed and gazed, fascinated, till her bewildered eyes seemed to perceive shadows upon it, moving—moving—toward her.

A panic fear seized her.