The Case of Richard Meynell

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

As to Hester herself, she seemed to have been keeping the Fox-Wilton household in perpetual fear. She went about in her mocking, mysterious way, denying that she knew anything about Sir Philip Meryon, or had any dealings with him. Yet it was shrewdly suspected that letters had passed between them, and Hester's proceedings were so quick-silverish and incalculable that it was impossible to keep a constant watch upon her. In the wilderness of Maudeley Park, which lay directly between the two houses, they might quite well have met—they probably had met. Meynell noticed and rebuked in himself a kind of settled pessimism as to Hester's conduct and future. "Do what you will," it seemed to say—"do all you can—but that life has in it the ferments of tragedy."

Had they at least been doing all they could? he asked himself anxiously, vowing that no public campaign must or should distract him from a private trust much older than it, and no less sacred. In the midst of the turmoil of these weeks he had been corresponding on Lady Fox-Wilton's behalf with a lady in Paris to whom a girl of Hester's age and kind might be safely committed for the perfecting of her French and music. It had been necessary to warn the lady that in the case of such a pensionnaire as Hester the male sex might give trouble; and Hester had not yet signified her gracious consent to go.

But she would go—she must go—and either he or Alice Puttenham would take her over and install her. Good heavens, if one had only Edith Fox-Wilton to depend on in these troubles!

As for Philip Meryon, he was, of course, now and always, a man of vicious habits and no scruples. He seemed to be staying at Sandford with the usual crew of flashy, disreputable people, and to allow Hester to run any risks with regard to him would be simply criminal. Yet with so inefficient a watch-dog as Lady Fox-Wilton, who could guarantee anything? Alice, of course, thought of nothing else than Hester, night and day. But it was part of the pathos of the situation that she had so little influence on the child's thoughts and deeds.

Poor, lonely woman! In Alice's sudden friendship for Mary Elsmere, her junior by some twelve years, the Rector, with an infinite pity, read the confession of a need that had become at last intolerable. For these seventeen years he had never known her make an intimate friend, and to see her now with this charming, responsive girl was to realize what the long hunger for affection must have been. Yet even now, how impossible to satisfy it, as other women could satisfy it! What ghosts and shadows about the path of friendship!

"A dim and perilous way," his mind went sounding back along the intricacies of Alice Puttenham's story. The old problems arose in connection with it—problems now of ethics, now of expediency. And interfused with them a sense of dull amazement and yet of intolerable repetition—in this difficulty which had risen with regard to Hester. The owner of Sandford—and Hester! When he had first seen them together, it had seemed a thing so sinister that his mind had refused to take it seriously. A sharp word to her, a word of warning to her natural guardians—and surely all was mended. Philip never stayed more than three weeks in the old house; he would very soon be gone, and Hester's fancy would turn to something else.

But that the passing shock should become anything more! There rose before Meynell's imagination a vision of the two by the river, not in the actual brightness of the August afternoon, but bathed, as it were, in angry storm-light; behind them, darkness, covering "old, unhappy, far-off things." From that tragical gloom it seemed as though their young figures had but just emerged, unnaturally clear; and yet the trailing clouds were already threatening the wild beauty of the girl.

He blamed himself for lack of foresight. It should have been utterly impossible for those two to meet! Meryon generally appeared at Sandford three times a year, for various sporting purposes. Hester might easily have been sent away during these descents. But the fact was she had grown up so rapidly—yesterday a mischievous child, to-day a woman in her first bloom—that they had all been taken by surprise. Besides, who could have imagined any communication whatever between the Fox-Wilton household and the riotous party at Sandford Abbey?

As to the girl herself, Meynell was always conscious of being engaged in some long struggle to save and protect his ward against her will. There were circumstances connected with Hester that should have stirred in the few people who knew them a special softness of heart in regard to her. But it was not easy to feel it. The Rector had helped two women to watch over her upbringing; he had brought her to her first communion, and tried hard, and quite in vain, to instil into her the wholesome mysticisms of the Christian faith; and the more efforts he made, the more sharply was he aware of the hard, egotistical core of the girl's nature, of Hester's fatal difference from other girls.

And yet, as he thought of her with sadness and perplexity, there came across him the memory of Mrs. Elsmere's sudden movement toward Hester; how she had drawn the child to her and kissed her—she, so unearthly and so spiritual, whose very aspect showed her the bondswoman of Christ.