Produced by Andrew Templeton, Juliet Sutherland, Mary

Meehan and PG Distributed Proofreaders

THE CASE OF RICHARD MEYNELL

BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

1911

TO THE MEMORY OF A BELOVED CHILD

A FOREWORD

May I ask those of my American readers who are not intimately acquainted with the conditions of English rural and religious life to remember that the dominant factor in it—the factor on which the story of Richard Meynell depends—is the existence of the State Church, of the great ecclesiastical corporation, the direct heir of the pre-Reformation Church, which owns the cathedrals and the parish churches, which by right of law speaks for the nation on all national occasions, which crowns and marries and buries the Kings of England, and, through her bishops in the House of Lords, exercises a constant and important influence on the lawmaking of the country? This Church possesses half the elementary schools, and is the legal religion of the great public schools which shape the ruling upper class. She is surrounded with the prestige of centuries, and it is probable that in many directions she was never so active or so well served by her members as she is at present.

At the same time, there are great forces of change ahead. Outside the Anglican Church stands quite half the nation, gathered in the various non-conformist bodies—Wesleyan, Congregational, Baptist, Presbyterian, and so on. Between them and the Church exists a perpetual warfare, partly of opinion, partly of social difference and jealousy. In every village and small town this warfare exists. The non-conformist desires to deprive the Church of her worldly and political privileges; the churchman talks of the sin of schism, or draws up schemes of reunion which drop still-born. Meanwhile, alike in the Church, in non-conformity, and in the neutral world which owes formal allegiance to neither, vast movements of thought have developed in the last hundred years, years as pregnant with the germs of new life as the wonderful hundred years that followed the birth of Christ. Whether the old bottles can be adjusted to the new wine, whether further division or a new Christian unity is to emerge from the strife of tongues, whether the ideas of modernism; rife in all forms of Christianity, can be accommodated to the ancient practices and given a share in the great material possessions of a State Church; how individual lives are affected in the passionate struggle of spiritual faiths and practical interests involved in such an attempt; how conscience may be enriched by its success or sterilized by its failure; how the fight itself, ably waged, may strengthen the spiritual elements, the power of living and suffering in men and women—it is with such themes that this story attempts to deal. Twenty-two years ago I tried a similar subject in "Robert Elsmere." Since then the movement of ideas in religion and philosophy has been increasingly rapid and fruitful. I am deeply conscious how little I may be able to express it. But those who twenty years ago welcomed the earlier book—and how can I ever forget its reception in America!—may perhaps be drawn once again to some of the old themes in their new dress.

MARY A. WARD

ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHARLES E. BROCK

"'My dear fellow! No woman ought to marry under nineteen or twenty'"

The Rectory

"Meynell, as he hesitatingly advanced, became the spectator of a scene not intended for his eyes"

"He shook hands with the Dean"

"'I wonder whether she's ever had any real joy—a week's—a day's—happiness—in her life?'"

"The old shepherd looked after her doubtfully"

BOOK I

MEYNELL

"Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear
The longest date do melt like frosty rime,
That in the morning whitened hill and plain
And is no more; drop like the tower sublime
Of yesterday, which royally did wear
His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain
Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time."

CHAPTER I

"Hullo, Preston! don't trouble to go in."

The postman, just guiding his bicycle into the Rectory drive, turned at the summons and dismounted. The Rector approached him from the road, and the postman, diving into his letter-bag and into the box of his bicycle, brought out a variety of letters and packages, which he placed in the Rector's hands.

The recipient smiled.

"My word, what a post! I say, Preston, I add to your burdens pretty considerably."

"It don't matter, sir, I'm sure," said the postman civilly. "There's not a deal of letters delivered in this village."

"No, we don't trouble pen and ink much in Upcote," said the Rector; "and it's my belief that half the boys and girls that do learn to read and write at school make a point of forgetting it as soon as they can—for all practical purposes, anyway."

"Well, there's a deal of newspapers read now, sir, compared to what there was."

"Newspapers? Yes, I do see a Reynolds or a People or two about on Sunday. Do you think anybody reads much else than the betting and the police news, eh, Preston?"

Preston looked a little vacant. His expression seemed to say, "And why should they?" The Rector, with his arms full of the post, smiled again and turned away, looking back, however, to say:

"Wife all right again?"

"Pretty near, sir; but she's had an awful bad time, and the doctor—he makes her go careful."

"Quite right. Has Miss Puttenham been looking after her?"

"She's been most kind, sir, most attentive, she have," said the postman warmly, his long hatchet face breaking into animation.

"Lucky for you!" said the Rector, walking away. "When she cuts in, she's worth a regiment of doctors. Good-day!"

The speaker passed on through the gate of the Rectory, pausing as he did so with a rueful look at the iron gate itself, which was off its hinges and sorely in want of a coat of new paint.

"Disgraceful!" he said to himself; "must have a go at it to-morrow. And at the garden, too," he added, looking round him. "Never saw such a wilderness!"

[Illustration: The Rectory]

He was advancing toward a small gabled house of an Early Victorian type, built about 1840 by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners on the site of an old clergy house, of which all traces had been ruthlessly effaced. The front garden lying before it was a tangle of old and for the most part ugly trees; elms from which heavy, decayed branches had recently fallen; acacias choked by the ivy which had overgrown them; and a crowded thicket of thorns and hazels, mingled with three or four large and vigorous though very ancient yews, which seemed to have drunk up for themselves all that life from the soil which should have gone to maintain the ragged or sickly shrubbery. The trees also had gradually encroached upon the house, and darkened all the windows on the porch side. On a summer afternoon, the deep shade they made was welcome enough; but on a rainy day the Rector's front-garden, with its coarse grass, its few straggling rose-bushes, and its pushing throng of half-dead or funereal trees, shed a dank and dripping gloom upon the visitor approaching his front door. Of this, however, the Rector himself was rarely conscious; and to-day, as he with difficulty gathered all the letters and packets taken from the postman into one hand, while he opened his front door with the other, his face showed that the state of his garden had already ceased to trouble him.

He had no sooner turned the handle of the door than a joyous uproar of dogs arose within, and before he had well stepped over the threshold a leaping trio were upon him—two Irish terriers and a graceful young collie, whose rough caresses nearly made him drop his letters.

"Down, Jack! Be quiet, you rascals! I say—Anne!"

A woman's voice answered his call.

"I'm just bringing the tea, sir."

"Any letter for me this afternoon?"

"There's a note on the hall-table, sir."

The Rector hurried into the sitting-room to the right of the hall, deposited the letters and packets which he held on a small, tumble-down sofa already littered with books and papers, and returned to the hall-table for the letter. He tore it open, read it with slightly frowning brows and a mouth that worked unconsciously, then thrust it into his pocket and returned to his sitting-room.

"All right!" he said to himself. "He's got an odd list of 'aggrieved parishioners!'"

The tidings, however, which the letter contained did not seem to distress him. On the contrary, his aspect expressed a singular and cheerful energy, as he sat a few moments on the sofa, softly whistling to himself and staring at the floor. That he was a person extravagantly beloved by his dogs was clearly shown meanwhile by the exuberant attentions and caresses with which they were now loading him.

He shook them off at last with a friendly kick or two, that he might turn to his letters, which he sorted and turned over, much as an epicure studies his menu at the Ritz, and with an equally keen sense of pleasure to come.

A letter from Jena, and another from Berlin, addressed in small German handwriting and signed by names familiar to students throughout the world; two or three German reviews, copies of the Revue Critique and the Revue Chrétienne, a book by Solomon Reinach, and three or four French letters, one of them shown by the cross preceding the signature to be the letter of a bishop; a long letter from Oxford, enclosing the proof of an article in a theological review; and, finally, a letter sealed with red wax and signed "F. Marcoburg" in a corner of the envelope, which the Rector twirled in his hands a moment without opening.

"After tea," he said at last, with the sudden breaking of a smile. And he put it on the sofa beside him.

As he spoke the door opened to admit his housekeeper with the tray, to the accompaniment of another orgie of barks. A stout woman in a sun-bonnet, with a broad face and no features to speak of, entered.

"I'll be bound you've had no dinner," she said sulkily, as she placed the tea before him on a chair cleared with difficulty from some of the student's litter that filled the room.

"All the more reason for tea," said Meynell, seizing thirstily on the teapot. "And you're quite mistaken, Anne. I had a magnificent bath-bun at the station."

"Much good you'll get out of that!" was the scornful reply. "You know what Doctor Shaw told you about that sort o' goin' on."

"Never you mind, Anne. What about that painter chap?"

"Gone home for the week-end." Mrs. Wellin retreated a foot or two and crossed her arms, bare to the elbow, in front of her.

The Rector stared.

"I thought I had taken him on by the week to paint my house," he said at last.

"So you did. But he said he must see his missus and hear how his little girl had done in her music exam."

Mrs. Wellin delivered this piece of news very fast and with evident gusto. It might have been thought she enjoyed inflicting it on her master.

The Rector laughed out.

"And this was a man sent me a week ago by the Birmingham Distress Committee—nine weeks out of work—family in the workhouse—everything up the spout. Goodness gracious, Anne, how did he get the money? Return fare, Birmingham, three-and-ten."

"Don't ask me, sir," said the woman in the sun-bonnet. "I don't go pryin' into such trash!"

"Is he coming back? Is my house to be painted?" asked the Rector helplessly.

"Thought he might," said Anne, briefly.

"How kind of him! Music exam! Lord save us! And three-and-ten thrown into the gutter on a week-end ticket—with seven children to keep—and all your possessions gone to 'my uncle.' And it isn't as though you'd been starving him, Anne!"

"I wish I hadn't dinnered him as I have been doin'!" the woman broke out. "But he'll know the difference next week! And now, sir, I suppose you'll be goin' to that place again to-night?"

Anne jerked her thumb behind her over her left shoulder.

"Suppose so, Anne. Can't afford a night-nurse, and the wife won't look after him."

"Why don't some one make her?" said Anne, frowning.

The Rector's face changed.

"Better not talk about it, Anne. When a woman's been in hell for years, you needn't expect her to come out an angel. She won't forgive him, and she won't nurse him—that's flat."

"No reason why she should shovel him off on other people as wants their night's rest. It's takin' advantage—that's what it is."

"I say, Anne, I must read my letters. And just light me a bit of fire, there's a good woman. July!—ugh!—it might be February!"

In a few minutes a bit of fire was blazing in the grate, though the windows were still wide open, and the Rector, who had had a long journey that day to take a funeral for a friend, lay back in sybaritic ease, now sipping his tea and now cutting open letters and parcels. The letter signed "F. Marcoburg" in the corner had been placed, still unopened, on the mantelpiece now facing him.

The Rector looked at it from time to time; it might have been said by a close observer that he never forgot it; but, all the same, he went on dipping into books and reviews, or puzzling—with muttered imprecations on the German tongue—over some of his letters.

"By Jove! this apocalyptic Messianic business is getting interesting. Soon we shall know where all the Pauline ideas came from—every single one of them! And what matter? Who's the worse? Is it any less wonderful when we do know? The new wine found its bottles ready—that's all."

As he sat there he had the aspect of a man enjoying apparently the comfort of his own fireside. Yet, now that the face was at rest, certain cavernous hollows under the eyes, and certain lines on the forehead and at the corners of the mouth, as though graven by some long fatigue, showed themselves disfiguringly. The personality, however, on which this fatigue had stamped itself was clearly one of remarkable vigour, physical and mental. A massive head covered with strong black hair, curly at the brows; eyes grayish-blue, small, with some shade of expression in them which made them arresting, commanding, even; a large nose and irregular mouth, the lips flexible and kind, the chin firm—one might have made some such catalogue of Meynell's characteristics; adding to them the strength of a broad-chested, loose-limbed frame, made rather, one would have thought, for country labours than for the vigils of the scholar. But the hands were those of a man of letters—bony and long-fingered, but refined, touching things with care and gentleness, like one accustomed to the small tools of the writer.

At last the Rector threw himself back in his chair, while some of the litter on his lap fell to the floor, temporarily dislodging one of the terriers, who sat up and looked at him with reproach.

"Now then!" he said, and reached out for the letter on the mantelpiece.
He turned it over a moment in his hand and opened it.

It was long, and the reader gave it a close attention. When he had finished it he put it down and thought a while, then stretched out his hand for it again and reread the last paragraph:

"You will, I am sure, realize from all I have said, my dear Meynell, that the last thing I personally wish to do is to interfere with the parochial work of a man for whom I have so warm a respect as I have for you. I have given you all the latitude I could, but my duty is now plain. Let me have your assurance that you will refrain from such sermons as that to which I have drawn your attention, and that you will stop at once the extraordinary innovations in the services of which the parishioners have complained, and I shall know how to answer Mr. Barron and to compose this whole difficult matter. Do not, I entreat you, jeopardize the noble work you are doing for the sake of opinions and views which you hold to-day, but which you may have abandoned tomorrow. Can you possibly put what you call 'the results of criticism'—and, remember, these results differ for you, for me, and for a dozen others I could name—in comparison with that work for souls God has given you to do, and in which He has so clearly blessed you? A Christian pastor is not his own master, and cannot act with the freedom of other men. He belongs by his own act to the Church and to the flock of Christ; he must always have in view the 'little ones' whom he dare not offend. Take time for thought, my dear Meynell—and time, above all, for prayer—and then let me hear from you. You will realize how much and how anxiously I think of you.

"Yours always sincerely in Christ,

"F. MARCOBURG."

"Good man—true bishop!" said the Rector to himself, as he again put down the letter; but even as he spoke the softness in his face passed into resolution. He sank once more into reverie.

The stillness, however, was soon broken up. A step was heard outside, and the dogs sprang up in excitement. Amid a pandemonium of noise, the Rector put his head out of window.

"Is that you, Barron? Come in, old fellow; come in!"

A slender figure in a long coat passed the window, the front door opened, and a young man entered the study. He was dressed in orthodox clerical garb, and carried a couple of books under his arm.

"I came to return these," he said, placing them beside the Rector; "and also—can you give me twenty minutes?"

"Forty, if you want them. Sit down."

The newcomer turned out various French and German books from a dilapidated armchair, and obeyed. He was a fresh-coloured, handsome youth, some fifteen years younger than Meynell, the typical public-school boy in appearance. But his expression was scarcely less harassed than the Rector's.

"I expect you have heard from my father," he said abruptly.

"I found a letter waiting for me," said Meynell, holding up the note he had taken from the hall-table on coming in. But he pursued the subject no further.

The young man fidgeted a moment.

"All one can say is"—he broke out at last—"that if it had not been my father, it would have been some one else—the Archdeacon probably. The fight was bound to come."

"Of course it was!" The Rector sprang to his feet, and, with his hands under his coat-tails and his back to the fire, faced his visitor. "That's what we're all driving at. Don't be miserable about it, dear fellow. I bear your father no grudge whatever. He is under orders, as I am. The parleying time is done. It has lasted two generations. And now comes war—honourable, necessary war!"

The speaker threw back his head with emphasis, even with passion. But almost immediately the smile, which was the only positive beauty of the face, obliterated the passion.

"And don't look so tragic over it! If your father wins—and as the law stands he can scarcely fail to win—I shall be driven out of Upcote. But there will always be a corner somewhere for me and my books, and a pulpit of some sort to prate from."

"Yes, but what about us?" said the newcomer, slowly.

"Ah!" The Rector's voice took a dry intonation. "Yes—well!-you Liberals will have to take your part, and fire your shot some day, of course—fathers or no fathers."

"I didn't mean that. I shall fire my shot, of course. But aren't you exposing yourself prematurely—unnecessarily?" said the young man, with vivacity. "It is not a general's part to do that."

"You're wrong, Stephen. When my father was going out to the campaign in which he was killed, my mother said to him, as though she were half asking a question, half pleading—I can hear her now, poor darling!—'John, it's right for a general to keep out of danger?' and he smiled and said, 'Yes, when it isn't right for him to go into it, head over ears.' However, that's nonsense. It doesn't apply to me. I'm no general. And I'm not going to be killed!"

Young Barron was silent, while the Rector prepared a pipe, and began upon it; but his face showed his dissatisfaction.

"I've not said much to father yet about my own position," he resumed; "but, of course, he guesses. It will be a blow to him," he added, reluctantly.

The Rector nodded, but without showing any particular concern, though his eyes rested kindly on his companion.

"We have come to the fighting," he repeated, "and fighting means blows. Moreover, the fight is beginning to be equal. Twenty years ago—in Elsmere's time—a man who held his views or mine could only go. Voysey, of course, had to go; Jowett, I am inclined to think, ought to have gone. But the distribution of the forces, the lie of the field, is now altogether changed. I am not going till I am turned out; and there will be others with me. The world wants a heresy trial, and it is going to get one this time."

A laugh—a laugh of excitement and discomfort—escaped the younger man.

"You talk as though the prospect was a pleasant one!"

"No—but it is inevitable."

"It will be a hateful business," Baron went on, impetuously. "My father has a horribly strong will. And he will think every means legitimate."

"I know. In the Roman Church, what the Curia could not do by argument they have done again and again—well, no use to inquire how! One must be prepared. All I can say is, I know of no skeletons in the cupboard at present. Anybody may have my keys!"

He laughed as he spoke, spreading his hands to the blaze, and looking round at his companion. Barron's face in response was a face of hero-worship, undisguised. Here plainly were leader and disciple; pioneering will and docile faith. But it might have been observed that Meynell did nothing to emphasize the personal relation; that, on the contrary, he shrank from it, and often tried to put it aside.

After a few more words, indeed, he resolutely closed the personal discussion. They fell into talk about certain recent developments of philosophy in England and France—talk which showed them as familiar comrades in the intellectual field, in spite of their difference of age. Barron, a Fellow of King's, had but lately left Cambridge for a small College living. Meynell—an old Balliol scholar—bore the marks of Jowett and Caird still deep upon him, except, perhaps, for a certain deliberate throwing over, here and there, of the typical Oxford tradition—its measure and reticence, its scholarly balancing of this against that. A tone as of one driven to extremities—a deep yet never personal exasperation—the poised quiet of a man turning to look a hostile host in the face—again and again these made themselves felt through his chat about new influences in the world of thought—Bergson or James, Eucken or Tyrell.

And to this under-note, inflections or phrases in the talk of the other seemed to respond. It was as though behind the spoken conversation they carried on another unheard.

And the unheard presently broke in upon the heard.

"You mentioned Elsmere just now," said Barron, in a moment's pause, and with apparent irrelevance. "Did you know that his widow is now staying within a mile of this place? Some people called Flaxman have taken Maudeley End, and Mrs. Flaxman is a sister of Mrs. Elsmere. Mrs. Elsmere and her daughter are going to settle for the summer in the cottage near Forkéd Pond. Mrs. Elsmere seems to have been ill for the first time in her life, and has had to give up some of her work."

"Mrs. Elsmere!" said Meynell, raising his eyebrows. "I saw her once twenty years ago at the New Brotherhood, and have never forgotten the vision of her face. She must be almost an old woman."

"Miss Puttenham says she is quite beautiful still, in a wonderful, severe way. I think she never shared Elsmere's opinions?"

"Never."

The two fell silent, both minds occupied with the same story and the same secret comparisons. Robert Elsmere, the Rector of Murewell, in Surrey, had made a scandal in the Church, when Meynell was still a lad, by throwing up his orders under the pressure of New Testament criticism, and founding a religious brotherhood among London workingmen for the promotion of a simple and commemorative form of Christianity.

Elsmere, a man of delicate physique, had died prematurely, worn out by the struggle to find new foothold for himself and others; but something in his personality, and in the nature of his effort—some brilliant, tender note—had kept his memory alive in many hearts. There were many now, however, who thrilled to it, who could never speak of him without emotion, who yet felt very little positive agreement with him. What he had done or tried to do made a kind of landmark in the past; but in the course of time it had begun to seem irrelevant to the present.

"To-day—would he have thrown up?—or would he have held on?" Meynell presently said, in a tone of reverie, amid the cloud of smoke that enveloped him. Then, in another voice, "What do you hear of the daughter? I remember her as a little reddish-haired thing at her mother's side."

"Miss Puttenham has taken a great fancy to her. Hester Fox-Wilton told me she had seen her there. She liked her."

"H'm!" said the Rector. "Well, if she pleased Hester—critical little minx!"

"You may be sure she'll please me!" said Barron suddenly, flushing deeply.

The Rector looked up, startled.

"I say?"

Barron cleared his throat.

"I'd better tell you at once, Rector. I got Hester's leave yesterday to tell you, when an opportunity occurred—you know how fond she is of you? Well, I'm in love with her—head over ears in love with her—I believe I have been since she was a little girl in the schoolroom. And yesterday—she said—she'd marry me some day."

The young voice betrayed a natural tremor. Meanwhile, a strange look—a close observer would have called it a look of consternation—had rushed into Meynell's face. He stared at Barron, made one or two attempts to speak, and, a last, said abruptly:

"That'll never do, Stephen—that'll never do! You shouldn't have spoken."

Barron's face showed the wound.

"But, Rector—"

"She's too young," said Meynell, with increased harshness, "much too young! Hester is only seventeen. No girl ought to be pledged so early. She ought to have more time—time to look round her. Promise me, my dear boy, that there shall be nothing irrevocable—no engagement! I should strongly oppose it."

The eyes of the two men met. Barron was evidently dumb with surprise; but the vivacity and urgency of Meynell's expression drove him into speech.

"We thought you would have sympathized," he stammered. "After all, what
is there so much against it? Hester is, you know, not very happy at home.
I have my living, and some income of my own, independent of my father.
Supposing he should object—"

"He would object," said Meynell quickly. "And Lady Fox-Wilton would certainly object. And so should I. And, as you know, I am co-guardian of the children with her."

Then, as the lover quivered under these barbs, Meynell suddenly recovered himself.

"My dear fellow! No woman ought to marry under twenty-one. And every girl ought to have time to look round her. It's not right; it's not just—it isn't, indeed! Put this thing by for a while. You'll lose nothing by it. We'll talk of it again in two years."

And, drawing his chair nearer to his companion, Meynell fell into a strain of earnest and affectionate entreaty, which presently had a marked effect on the younger man. His chivalry was appealed to—his consideration for the girl he loved; and his aspect began to show the force of the attack. At last he said gravely:

"I'll tell Hester what you say—of course I'll tell her. Naturally we can't marry without your consent and her mother's. But if Hester persists in wishing we should be engaged?"

"Long engagements are the deuce!" said the Rector hotly. "You would be engaged for three years. Madness!—with such a temperament as Hester's. My dear Stephen, be advised—for her and yourself. There is no one who wishes your good more earnestly than I. But don't let there be any talk of an engagement for at least two years to come. Leave her free—even if you consider yourself bound. It is folly to suppose that a girl of such marked character knows her own mind at seventeen. She has all her development to come."

Barron had dropped his head on his hands.

"I couldn't see anybody else courting her—without—"

"Without cutting in. I daresay not," said Meynell, with a rather forced laugh. "I'd forgive you that. But now, look here."

The two heads drew together again, and Meynell resumed conversation, talking rapidly, in a kind, persuasive voice, putting the common sense of the situation—holding out distant hopes. The young man's face gradually cleared. He was of a docile, open temper, and deeply attached to his mentor.

At last the Rector sprang up, consulting his watch.

"I must send you off, and go to sleep. But we'll talk of this again."

"Sleep!" exclaimed Barron, astonished. "It's just seven o'clock. What are you up to now?"

"There's a drunken fellow in the village—dying—and his wife won't look after him. So I have to put in an appearance to-night. Be off with you!"

"I shouldn't wonder if the Flaxmans were of some use to you in the village," said Stephen, taking up his hat. "They're rich, and, they say, very generous."

"Well, if they'll give me a parish nurse, I'll crawl to them," said the Rector, settling himself in his chair and putting an old shawl over his knees. "And as you go out, just tell Anne, will you, to keep herself to herself for an hour and not to disturb me?"

Stephen Barron moved to the door, and as he opened it he turned back a moment to look at the man in the chair, and the room in which he sat. It was as though he asked himself by what manner of man he had been thus gripped and coerced, in a matter so intimate, and, to himself, so vital.

Meynell's eyes were already shut. The dogs had gathered round him, the collie's nose laid against his knee, the other two guarding his feet. All round, the walls were laden with books, so were the floor and the furniture. A carpenter's bench filled the further end of the room. Carving tools were scattered on it, and a large piece of wood-carving, half finished, was standing propped against it. It was part of some choir decoration that Meynell and a class of village boys were making for the church, where the Rector had already carved with his own hand many of the available surfaces, whether of stone or wood. The carving, which was elaborate and rich, was technically faulty, as an Italian primitive is faulty, but mutatis mutandis it had much of the same charm that belongs to Italian primitive work: the same joyous sincerity, the same passionate love of natural things, leaves and flowers and birds.

For the rest, the furniture of the room was shabby and ugly. The pictures on the walls were mostly faded Oxford photographs, or outlines by Overbeck and Retsch, which had belonged to Meynell's parents and were tenderly cherished by him. There were none of the pretty, artistic trifles, the signs of travel and easy culture, which many a small country vicarage possesses in abundance. Meynell, in spite of his scholar's mastery of half-a-dozen languages, had never crossed the Channel. Barron, lingering at the door, with his eyes on the form by the fire, knew why. The Rector had always been too poor. He had been left an orphan while still at Balliol, and had to bring up his two younger brothers. He had done it. They were both in Canada now and prospering. But the signs of the struggle were on this shabby house, and on this shabby, frugal, powerfully built man. Yet now he might have been more at ease; the living, though small, was by no means among the worst in the diocese. Ah, well! Anne, the housekeeper and only servant, knew how the money went—and didn't go, and she had passed on some of her grievances to Barron. They two knew—though Barron would never have dared to show his knowledge—what a wrestle it meant to get the Rector to spend what was decently necessary on his own food and clothes; and Anne spent hours of the night in indignantly guessing at what he spent on the clothes and food of other people—mostly, in her opinion, "varmints."

These things flitted vaguely through the young man's sore mind. Then in a flash they were absorbed in a perception of a wholly different kind. The room seemed to him transfigured; a kind of temple. He thought of the intellectual life which had been lived there; the passion for truth which had burnt in it; the sermons and books that had been written on those crowded tables; the personality and influence that had been gradually built up within it, so that to him, as to many others, the dingy study was a place of pilgrimage, breathing inspiration; and his heart went out, first in discipleship, and then in a pain that was not for himself. For over his friend's head he saw the gathering of clouds not now to be scattered or dispersed; and who could foretell the course of the storm?

The young man gently closed the door and went his way. He need not have left the house so quietly. The Rector got no sleep that evening.

CHAPTER II

The church clock of Upcote Minor was just striking nine o'clock as Richard Meynell, a few hours later than the conversation just recorded, shut the Rectory gate behind him, and took his way up the village.

The night was cold and gusty. The summer this year had forgotten to be balmy, and Meynell, who was an ardent sun-lover, shivered as he walked along, buttoning a much-worn parson's coat against the sharp air. Before him lay the long, straggling street, with its cottages and small shops, its post-office, and public-houses, and its occasional gentlefolks' dwellings, now with a Georgian front plumb on the street, and now hidden behind walls and trees. It was evidently a large village, almost a country town, with a considerable variety of life. At this hour of the evening most of the houses were dark, for the labourers had gone to bed. But behind the drawn blinds of the little shops there were still lights here and there, and in the houses of the gentility.

The Rector passed the fine perpendicular church standing back from the road, with its churchyard about it; and just beyond it, he turned, his pace involuntarily slackening, to look at a small gabled house, surrounded by a garden, and overhung by a splendid lime tree. Suddenly, as he approached it, the night burst into fragrance, for a gust of wind shook the lime-blossom, and flung the scent in Meynell's face; while at the same time the dim masses of roses in the garden sent out their sweetness to the passers-by.

A feeling of pleasure, quick, involuntary, passed through his mind; pleasure in the thought of what these flowers meant to the owner of them. He had a vision of a tall and slender woman, no longer young, with a delicate and plaintive face, moving among the rose-beds she loved, her light dress trailing on the grass. The recollection stirred in him affection, and an impulse of sympathy, stronger than the mere thought of the flowers, and the woman's tending of them, could explain. It passed indeed immediately into something else—a touch of new and sharp anxiety.

"And she's been very peaceful of late," he said to himself ruefully, "as far at least as Hester ever lets her be. Preston's wife was a godsend. Perhaps now she'll come out of her shell and go more among the people. It would help her. Anyway, we can't have everything rooted up again just yet—before the time."

He walked on, and as the farther corner of the house came into view, he saw a thinly curtained window with a light inside it, and it seemed to him that he distinguished a figure within.

"Reading?—or embroidering? Probably, at her work. She had that commission to finish. Busy woman!"

He fell to imagining the little room, the embroidery frame, the books, and the brindled cat on the rug, of no particular race or beauty; for use not for show; but sensitive and gentle like its mistress, and like her, not to be readily made friends with.

"How wise of her," he thought, "not to accept her sister's offer since
Ralph's death—to insist on keeping her little house and her
independence. Imagine her!—prisoned in that house, with that family.
Except for Hester—except for Hester!"

He smiled sadly to himself, threw a last troubled look at the little house, and left it behind him. Before him, the village street, with its green and its pond, widened under the scudding sky. Far ahead, about a quarter of a mile away, among surrounding trees, certain outlines were visible through the July twilight. The accustomed eye knew them for the chimneys of the Fox-Wiltons' house, owned now, since the recent death of its master, Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton, by his widow, the sister of the lady with the cat and the embroidery, and mother of many children, for the most part an unattractive brood, peevish and slow-minded like their father. Hester was the bright, particular star in that house, as Stephen Barron had now found out.

Alack!—alack! The Rector's face resumed for a moment the expression of painful or brooding perplexity it had worn during his conversation of the afternoon with young Barron, on the subject of Hester Fox-Wilton.

Another light in a window—and a sound of shouting and singing. The "Cowroast," a "public" mostly frequented by the miners who inhabited the northern end of the village, was evidently doing trade. The Rector did not look up as he passed it; but in general he turned an indulgent eye upon it. Before entering upon the living, he had himself worked for a month as an ordinary miner, in the colliery whose tall chimneys could be seen to the east above the village roofs. His body still vividly retained the physical memory of those days—of the aching muscles, and the gargantuan thirsts.

At last the rows of new-built cottages attached to the colliery came in view on the left; to the right, a steep hillside heavily wooded, and at the top of it, in the distance, the glimmering of a large white house—stately and separate—dominating the village, the church, the collieries, and the Fox-Wiltons' plantations.

The Rector threw a glance at it. It was from that house had come the letter he had found on his hall-table that afternoon; a letter in a handwriting large and impressive like the dim house on the hill. The handwriting of a man accustomed to command, whether his own ancestral estate, or the collieries which had been carved out of its fringe, or the village spreading humbly at his feet, or the church into which he walked on Sunday with heavy tread, and upright carriage, conscious of his threefold dignity—as squire, magistrate, and churchwarden.

"It's my business to fight him!" Meynell thought, looking at the house, and squaring his broad shoulders unconsciously. "It's not my business to hate him—not at all—rather to respect and sympathize with him. I provoke the fight—and I may be thankful to have lit on a strong antagonist. What's Stephen afraid of? What can they do? Let 'em try!"

A smile—contemptuous and good-humoured—crossed the Rector's face. Any angry bigot determined to rid his parish of a heretical parson might no doubt be tempted to use other than legal and theological weapons, if he could get them. A heretic with unpaid bills and some hidden vice is scarcely in a position to make much of his heresy. But the Rector's smile showed him humorously conscious of an almost excessive innocence of private life. The thought of how little an enemy could find to lay hold on in his history or present existence seemed almost to bring with it a kind of shamefacedness—as for experience irrevocably foregone, warm, tumultuous, human experience, among the sinners and sufferers of the world. For there are odd, mingled moments in the lives of most scholars and saints—like Renan in his queer envy of Théophile Gautier—when such men inevitably ask themselves whether they have not missed something irreplaceable, the student, by his learning—the saint even, by his goodness.

Here now was "Miners' Row." As the Rector approached the cottage of which he was in search the clouds lightened in the east, and a pale moonshine, suffusing the dusk, showed in the far distance beyond the village, the hills of Fitton Chase, rounded, heathy hills, crowned by giant firs. Meynell looked at them with longing, and a sudden realization of his own weariness. A day or two, perhaps a week or two, among the fells, with their winds and scents about him, and their streams in his ears—he must allow himself that, before the fight began.

No. 8. A dim light showed in the upper window. The Rector knocked at the door. A woman opened—a young and sweet-looking nurse in her bonnet and long cloak.

"You look pretty done!" exclaimed the Rector. "Has he been giving trouble?"

"Oh, no, sir, not more than usual. It's the two of them."

"She won't go to her sister's?"

"She won't stir a foot, sir."

"Where is she?" The nurse pointed to the living-room on her left.

"She scarcely eats anything—a sup of tea sometimes. And I doubt whether she sleeps at all."

"And she won't go to him?"

"If he were dying, and she alone with him in the house, I don't believe she'd go near him."

The Rector stepped in and asked a few questions as to arrangements for the night. The patient, it seemed, was asleep, in consequence of a morphia injection, and likely to remain so for an hour or two. He was dying of an internal injury inflicted by a fall of rock in the mine some ten days before. Surgery had done what it could, but signs of blood-poisoning had appeared, and the man's days were numbered.

The doctor had left written instructions, which the nurse handed over to Meynell. If certain symptoms appeared, the doctor was to be summoned. But in all probability the man's fine constitution, injured though it had been by drink, would enable him to hold out another day or two. And the hideous pain of the first week had now ceased; mortification had almost certainly set in, and all that could be done was to wait the slow and sure failure of the heart.

The nurse took leave. Meynell was hanging up his hat in the little passageway, when the door of the front parlour opened, after being unlocked.

Meynell looked round.

"Good evening, Mrs. Bateson. You are coming upstairs, I hope, with me?"

He spoke gently, but with a quiet authority.

The woman in the doorway shook her head. She was thin and narrow-chested. Her hair was already gray, though she could not have been more than thirty-five, and youth and comeliness had been long since battered from her face, partly by misery of mind, partly by direct ill usage of which there were evident traces. She looked steadily at the Rector.

"I'm not going," she said. "He's nowt to me. But I'd like to know what the doctor was thinkin' of him."

"The doctor thinks he may live through to-night and to-morrow night—not much more. He is your husband, Mrs. Bateson, and whatever you have against him, you'll be very sorry afterward if you don't give him help and comfort in his death. Come up now, I beg of you, and watch with me. He might die at any moment."

And Meynell put out his hand kindly toward the woman standing in the shadow, as though to lead her.

But she stepped backward.

"I know what I'm about," she said, breathing quick. "He made a fule o' me wi' that wanton Lizzie Short, and he near killt me the last morning afore he went. And I'd been a good wife to him for fifteen year, and never a word between us till that huzzy came along. And she's got a child by him, and he must go and throw it in my face that I'd never given him one. And he struck and cursed me that last morning—he wished me dead, he said. And I sat and prayed God to punish him. An' He did. The roof came down on him. And now he mun die. I've done wi' him—and she's done wi' him. He's made his bed, and he mun lig on it."

The Rector put up his hand sternly.

"Don't! Mrs. Bateson. Those are words you'll repent when you yourself come to die. He has sinned toward you—but remember!—he's a young man still—in the prime of life. He has suffered horribly—and he has only a few hours or days to live. He has asked for you already to-day, he is sure to ask for you to-night. Forgive him!—ask God to help him to die in peace!"

While he spoke she stood motionless, impassive. Meynell's voice had beautiful inflections, and he spoke with strong feeling. Few persons whom he so addressed could have remained unmoved. But Mrs. Bateson only retreated farther into the dreary little parlour, with its wool mats and antimacassars, and a tray of untasted tea on the table. She passed her tongue round her dry lips to moisten them before she spoke, quite calmly:

"Thank you, sir. Thank you. You mean well. But we must all judge for ourselves. If there's anything you want I can get for you, you knock twice on the floor—I shall hear you. But I'm not comin' up."

Meynell turned away discouraged, and went upstairs. In the room above lay the dying man—breathing quickly and shallowly under the influence of the drug that had been given him. The nurse had raised him on his pillows, and the window near him was open. His powerful chest was uncovered, and he seemed even in his sleep to be fighting for air. In the twelve hours that had elapsed since Meynell had last seen him he had travelled with terrible rapidity toward the end. He looked years older than in the morning; it was as though some sinister hand had been at work on the face, expanding here, contracting there, substituting chaos and nothingness for the living man.

The Rector sat down beside him. The room was small and bare—a little strip of carpet on the boards, a few chairs, and a little table with food and nourishment beside the bed. On the mantelpiece was a large printed card containing the football fixtures of the winter before. Bateson had once been a fine player. Of late years, however, his interest had been confined to betting heavily on the various local and county matches, and it was to his ill-luck as a gambler no less than to the influence of the flimsy little woman who had led him astray that his moral break-up might be traced.

A common tale!—yet more tragic than usual. For the bedroom contained other testimonies to the habits of a ruined man. There was a hanging bookcase on the wall, and the Rector sitting by the bed could just make out the titles of the books in the dim light.

Mill, Huxley, a reprint of Tom Paine, various books by Blatchford, the sixpenny editions of "Literature and Dogma," and Renan's "Life of Christ," some popular science volumes of Browning and Ruskin, and a group of well-thumbed books on the birds of Mercia—the little collection, hardly earned, and, to judge from its appearance, diligently read, showed that its owner had been a man of intelligence. The Rector looked from it to the figure in the bed with a pang at his heart.

All was still in the little cottage. Through the open window the Rector could see fold after fold of the Chase stretching north and west above the village. The moorland ridges shone clear under the moon, now bare, or scantily plumed by gaunt trees, and now clothed in a dense blackness of wood. Meynell, who knew every yard of the great heath and loved it well, felt himself lifted there in spirit as he looked. The "bunchberries" must just be ripening on the high ground—nestling scarlet and white amid their glossy leaves. And among them and beside them, the taller, slender bilberries, golden green; the exquisite grasses of the heath, pale pink, and silver, and purple, swaying in the winds, clothing acre after acre with a beauty beyond the looms of men; the purple heather and the ling flushing toward its bloom: and the free-limbed scattered birch trees, strongly scrawled against the sky. The scurry of the clouds over the purple sweeps of moor, the beat of the wind, and then suddenly, pools of fragrant air sun-steeped—he drew in the thought of it all, as he might have drunk the moorland breeze itself, with a thrill of pleasure, which passed at once into a movement of soul.

"My God—my God!"

No other words imagined or needed. Only a leap of the heart, natural, habitual, instinctive, from the imagined beauty of the heath, to the "Eternal Fountain" of all beauty.

The hand of the dying man made a faint rustling with the sheet. Meynell, checked, rebuked almost, by the slight sound, bent his eyes again on the sleeper, and leaning forward tried to meditate and pray. But to-night he found it hard. He realized anew his physical and mental fatigue, and a certain confused clamour of thought, strangely persistent behind the more external experience alike of body and mind; like the murmur of a distant sea heard from far inland, as the bond and background of all lesser sounds.

The phrases of the letter he had found on the hall-table recurred to him whether he would or no. They were mainly legal and technical, intimating that an application had been made to the Bishop of Markborough to issue a Commission of Inquiry into certain charges made by parishioners of Upcote Minor against the Rector of the parish. The writer of the letter was one of the applicants, and gave notice of his intention to prosecute the charges named, with the utmost vigour through all the stages prescribed by ecclesiastical law.

But it was, rather, some earlier letters from the same hand—letters more familiar, intimate, and discursive—that ultimately held the Rector's thoughts as he kept his watch. For in those letters were contained almost all the objections that a sensitive mind and heart had had to grapple with before determining on the course to which the Rector of Upcote was now committed. They were the voice of the "adversary," the "accuser." Crude or conventional, as the form of the argument might be, it yet represented the "powers and principalities" to be reckoned with. If the Rector's conscience could not sustain him against it, he was henceforth a dishonest and unhappy man; and when his lawyers had failed to protect him against its practical result—as they must no doubt fail—he would be a dispossessed priest:

"What discipline in life or what comfort in death can such a faith as yours bring to any human soul? Do, I beg of you, ask yourself this question. If the great miracles of the Creed are not true, what have you to give the wretched and the sinful? Ought you not in common human charity to make way for one who can offer the consolations, utter the warnings, or hold out the heavenly hopes from which you are debarred?"

* * * * *

The Rector fixed his gaze upon the sick man. It was as though the question of the letter were put to him through those parched lips. And as he looked, Bateson opened his eyes.

"Be that you, Rector?" he said, in a clear voice.

"I've been sitting up with you, Bateson. Can you take a little brandy and milk, do you think?"

The patient submitted, and the Rector, with a tender and skilful touch, made him comfortable on his pillows and smoothed the bedclothes.

"Where's my wife?" he said presently, looking round the room.

"She's sleeping downstairs."

"I want her to come up."

"Better not ask her. She seems ill and tired."

The sick man smiled—a slight and scornful smile.

"She'll ha' time enough presently to be tired. You goa an' ask her."

"I'd rather not leave you, Bateson. You're very ill."

"Then take that stick then, an' rap on the floor. She'll hear tha fast enough."

The Rector hesitated, but only for a moment. He took the stick and rapped.

Almost immediately the sound of a turning key was heard through the small thinly built cottage. The door below opened and footsteps came up the stairs. But before they reached the landing the sound ceased. The two men listened in vain.

"You goa an' tell her as I'm sorry I knocked her aboot," said Bateson, eagerly. "An' she can see for hersen as I can't aggravate her no more wi' the other woman." He raised himself on his elbow, staring into the Rector's face. "I'm done for—tell her that."

"Shall I tell her also, that you love her?—and you want her love?"

"Aye," said Bateson, nodding, with the same bright stare into Meynell's eyes. "Aye!"

Meynell made him drink a little more brandy, and then he went out to the person standing motionless on the stairs.

"What did you want, sir?" said Mrs. Bateson, under her breath.

"Mrs. Bateson—he begs you to come to him! He's sorry for his conduct—he says you can see for yourself that he can't wrong you any more. Come—and be merciful!"

The woman paused. The Rector could see the shiver of her thin shoulders under her print dress. Then she turned and quietly descended the cottage stairway. Half way down she looked up.

"Tell him I should do him nowt but harm. I"—her voice trembled for the first time—"I doan't bear him malice; I hope he'll not suffer. But I'm not comin'."

"Wait a moment, Mrs. Bateson! I was to tell you that in spite of all, he loved you—and he wanted your love."

She shook her head.

"It's no good talkin' that way. It'll mebbe use up his strength. Tell him I'd have got Lizzie Short to come an' nurse 'im, if I could. It's her place. But he knows as she an' her man flitted a fortnight sen, an' theer's no address."

And she disappeared. But at the foot of the stairs—standing unseen—she said in her usual tone:

"If there was a cup o' tea, I could bring you, sir—or anythin'?"

Meynell, distressed and indignant, did not answer. He returned to the sick-room. Bateson looked up as the Rector bent once more over the bed.

"She'll not coom?" he said, in a faint voice of surprise. "Well, that's a queer thing. She wasn't used to be a tough 'un. I could most make her do what I wanted. Well, never mind, Rector, never mind. Sit tha down—mebbe you'd be wanting to say a prayer. You're welcome. I reckon it'll do me no harm."

His lips parted in a smile—a smile of satire. But his brows frowned, and his eyes were still alive and bright, only now, as the watcher thought, with anger.

Meynell hesitated.

"I will say the church prayers, if you wish it, Bateson. Of course I will say them."

"But I doan't believe in 'em," said the sick man, smiling again, "an' you doan't believe in 'em, noather, if folk say true! Don't tha be vexed—I'm not saying it to cheek tha. But Mr. Barron, ee says ee'll make tha give up. Ee's been goin' roun' the village, talkin' to folk. I doan't care about that—an' I've never been one o' your men—not pious enough, be a long way—but I'd like to hear—now as I can't do tha no harm, Rector, now as I'm goin', an' you cawn't deny me—what tha does really believe. Will tha tell me?"

He turned, open-eyed, impulsive, intelligent, as he had always been in life.

The Rector started. The inward challenge had taken voice.

"Certainly I will tell you, if it will help you—if you're strong enough."

Bateson waved his hand contemptuously.

"I feel as strong as onything. That sup o' brandy has put some grit in me. Give me some more. Thank tha … Does tha believe in God, Rector?"

His whimsical, half-teasing, yet, at bottom, anxious look touched Meynell strangely.

"With all my life—and with all my strength!"

Meynell's gaze was fixed intently on his questioner. The night-light in the basin on the farther side of the room threw the strong features into shadowy relief, illumining the yearning kindliness of the eyes.

"What made tha believe in Him?"

"My own life—my own struggles—and sins—and sufferings," said Meynell, stooping toward the sick man, and speaking each word with an intensity behind which lay much that could never be known to his questioner. "A good man, Bateson, put it once in this way, 'There is something in me that asks something of me.' That's easy to understand, isn't it? If a man wants to be filthy, or drunken, or cruel, there is always a voice within—it may be weak or it may be strong—that asks of him to be—instead—pure and sober and kind. And perhaps he denies the Voice, refuses it—talks it down—again and again. Then the joy in his life dies out bit by bit, and the world turns to dust and ashes. Every time that he says No to the Voice he is less happy—he has less power of being happy. And the voice itself dies away—and death comes. But now, suppose he turns to the Voice and says 'Lead me—I follow!' And suppose he obeys, like a child stumbling. Then every time he stretches and bends his poor weak will so as to give It what it asks, his heart is happy; and strength comes—the strength to do more and do better. It asks him to love—to love men and women, not with lust, but with pure love; and as he obeys, as he loves—he knows—he knows that it is God asking, and that God has come to him and abides with him. So when death overtakes him he trusts himself to God as he would to his best friend."

"Tha'rt talkin' riddles, Rector!"

"No. Ask yourself. When you fell into sin with that woman, did nothing speak to you, nothing try to stop you?"

The bright half-mocking eyes below Meynell's wandered a little—wavered in expression.

"It was the hot blood in me—aye, an' in her too. Yo cawn't help them things."

"Can't you? When your wife suffered, didn't that touch you? Wouldn't you undo it now if you could?"

"Aye—because I'm goin'—doctor says I'm done for."

"No—well or ill—wouldn't you undo it—wouldn't you undo the blows you gave your wife—the misery you caused her?"

"Mebbe. But I cawn't."

"No—not in my sense or yours. But in God's sense you can. Turn your heart—ask Him to give you love—love to Him, who has been pleading with you all your life—love to your wife, and your fellow men—love—and repentance—and faith."

Meynell's voice shook. He was in an anguish at what seemed to him the weakness, the ineffectiveness, of his pleading.

A silence. Then the voice rose again from the bed.

"Dost tha believe in Jesus Christ, Rector? Mr. Barron, he calls tha an infidel. But he hasn't read the books you an' I have read, I'll uphold yer!"

The dying man raised his hand to the bookshelves beside him with a proud gesture.

The Rector slowly raised himself. An expression as of some passion within, trying at once to check and to utter itself, became visible on his face in the half light.

"It's not books that settle it, Jim. I'll try and put it to you—just as
I see it myself—just in the way it comes to me."

He paused a moment, frowning under the effort of simplification. The hidden need of the dying man seemed to be mysteriously conveyed to him—the pang of lonely anguish that death brings with it; the craving for comfort beneath the apparent scorn of faith; the human cry expressed in this strange catechism.

"Stop me if I tire you," he said at last. "I don't know if I can make it plain—but to me, Bateson, there are two worlds that every man is concerned with. There is this world of everyday life—work and business, sleeping and talking, eating and drinking—that you and I have been living in; and there is another world, within it, and alongside of it, that we know when we are quiet—when we listen to our own hearts, and follow that voice I spoke of just now. Jesus Christ called that other world the Kingdom of God—and those who dwell in it, the children of God. Love is the king of that world, and the law of it—Love, which is God. But different men—different races of men—give different names to that Love—see it under different shapes. To us—to you and to me—it speaks under the name and form of Jesus Christ. And so I come to say—so all Christians come to say—'I believe—in Jesus Christ our Lord'. For it is His life and His death that still to-day—as they have done for hundreds of years—draw men and women into the Kingdom—the Kingdom of Love—and so to God. He draws us to love—and so to God. And in God alone is the soul of man satisfied; satisfied—and at rest."

The last words were but just breathed—yet they carried with them the whole force of a man.

"That's all very well, Rector. But tha's given up th' Athanasian Creed, and there's mony as says tha doesn't hold by tother Creeds. Wilt tha tell me, as Jesus were born of a virgin?—or that a got up out o' the grave on the third day?"

The Rector's face, through all its harass, softened tenderly.

"If you were a well man, Bateson, we'd talk of that. But there's only one thing that matters to you now—it's to feel God with you—to be giving your soul to God."

The two men gazed at each other.

"What are tha nursin' me for, Rector?" said Bateson, abruptly—"I'm nowt to you."

"For the love of Christ," said Meynell, steadily, taking his hand—"and of you, in Christ. But you mustn't talk. Rest a while."

There was a silence. The July night was beginning to pale into dawn. Outside, beyond the nearer fields, the wheels and sheds and the two great chimneys of the colliery were becoming plain; the tints and substance of the hills were changing. Dim forms of cattle moved in the newly shorn grass; the sound of their chewing could be faintly heard.

Suddenly the dying man raised himself in bed.

"I want my wife!" he said imperiously. "I tell tha, I want my wife!"

It was as though the last energy of being had thrown itself into the cry—indignant, passionate, protesting.

Meynell rose.

"I will bring her."

Bateson gripped his hand.

"Tell her to mind that cottage at Morden End—and the night we came home there first—as married folk. Tell her I'm goin'—goin' fast."

He fell back, panting. Meynell gave him food and medicine. Then he went quickly downstairs, and knocked at the parlour door. After an interval of evident hesitation on the part of the occupant of the room, it was reluctantly unlocked. Meynell pushed it open wide.

"Mrs. Bateson—come to your husband—he is dying!"

The woman, deadly white, threw back her head proudly. But Meynell laid a peremptory hand on her arm.

"I command you—in God's name. Come!"

A struggle shook her. She yielded suddenly—and began to cry. Meynell patted her on the shoulder as he might have patted a child, said kind, soothing things, gave her her husband's message, and finally drew her from the room.

She went upstairs, Meynell following, anxious about the physical result of the meeting, and ready to go for the doctor at a moment's notice.

The door at the top of the stairs was open. The dying man lay on his side, gazing toward it, and gauntly illumined by the rising light.

The woman went slowly forward, drawn by the eyes directed upon her.

"I thowt tha'd come!" said Bateson, with a smile.

She sat down upon the bed, crouching, emaciated; at first motionless and voiceless; a spectacle little less piteous, little less deathlike, than the man on the pillows. He still smiled at her, in a kind of triumph; also silent, but his lips trembled. Then, groping, she put out her hand—her disfigured, toil-worn hand—and took his, raising it to her lips. The touch of his flesh seemed to loosen in her the fountains of the great deep. She slid to her knees and kissed him—enfolding him with her arms, the two murmuring together.

Meynell went out into the dawn. His mystical sense had beheld the Lord in that small upper room; had seen as it were the sacred hands breaking to those two poor creatures the sacrament of love. His own mind was for the time being tranquillized. It was as though he said to himself, "I know that trouble will come back—I know that doubts and fears will pursue me again; but this hour—this blessing—is from God!"…

The sun was high in a dewy world, already busy with its first labours of field and mine, when Meynell left the cottage. The church clock was on the stroke of eight.

He passed down the village street, and reached again the little gabled house which he had passed the night before. As he approached, there was a movement in the garden. A lady, who was walking among the roses, holding up her gray dress from the dew, turned and hastened toward the gate.

"Please come in! You must be tired out. The gardener told me he'd seen you about. We've got some coffee ready for you."

Meynell looked at the speaker in smiling astonishment.

"What are you up for at this hour?"

"Why shouldn't I be up? Look how lovely it is! I have a friend with me, and I want to introduce you."

Miss Puttenham opened her garden gate and drew in the Rector. Behind her among the roses Meynell perceived another lady—a girl, with bright reddish hair.

"Mary!" said Miss Puttenham.

The girl approached. Meynell had an impression of mingled charm and reticence as she gave him her hand. The eyes were sweet and shy. But the unconscious dignity of bearing showed that the shyness was the shyness of strong character, rather than of mere youth and innocence.

"This is my new friend, Mary Elsmere. You've heard they're at Forkéd Pond?" Alice Puttenham said, smiling, as she slipped her arm round the girl. "I captured her for the night, while Mrs. Elsmere went to town. I want you to know each other."

"Elsmere's daughter!" thought Meynell, with a thrill, as he followed the two ladies through the open French window into the little dining-room, where the coffee was ready. And he could not take his eyes from the young face.

CHAPTER III

"I am in love with the house—I adore the Chase—I like heretics—and I don't think I'm ever going home again!"

Mrs. Flaxman as she spoke handed a cup of tea to a tall gentleman, Louis Manvers by name, the possessor of a long, tanned countenance; of thin iron-gray hair, descending toward the shoulders; of a drooping moustache, and eyes that mostly studied the carpet or the knees of their owner. A shy, laconic person at first sight, with the manner of one to whom conversation, of the drawing-room kind, was little more than a series of doubtful experiments, that seldom or never came off.

Mrs. Flaxman, on the other hand, was a pretty woman of forty, still young and slender, in spite of two boys at Eton, one of them seventeen, and in the Eleven; and her talk was as rash and rapid as that of her companion was the reverse. Which perhaps might be one of the reasons why they were excellent friends, and always happy in each other's society.

Mr. Manvers overlooked a certain challenge that Mrs. Flaxman had thrown out, took the tea provided, and merely inquired how long the rebuilding of the Flaxmans' own house would take. For it appeared that they were only tenants of Maudeley House—furnished—for a year.

Mrs. Flaxman replied that only the British workman knew. But she looked upon herself as homeless for two years, and found the prospect as pleasant as her husband found it annoying.

"As if life was long enough to spend it in one county, and one house and park! I have shaken all my duties from me like old rags. No more school-treats, no more bean-feasts, no more hospital committees, for two whole years! Think of it! Hugh, poor wretch, is still Chairman of the County Council. That's why we took this place—it is within fifty miles. He has to motor over occasionally. But I shall make him resign that, next year. Then we are going for six months to Berlin—that's for music—my show! Then we take a friend's house in British East Africa, where you can see a lion kill from the front windows, and zebras stub up your kitchen garden. That's Hugh's show. Then of course there'll be Japan—and by that time there'll be airships to the North Pole, and we can take it on our way home!"

"Souvent femme varie!" Mr. Manvers raised a pair of surprisingly shrewd eyes from the carpet. "I remember the years when I used to try and dig you and Hugh out of Bagley, and drive you abroad—without the smallest success."

"Those were the years when one was moral and well-behaved! But everybody who is worth anything goes a little mad at forty. I was forty last week"—Rose Flaxman gave an involuntary sigh—"I can't get over it."

"Ah, well, it's quite time you were a little nipped by the years," said Manvers dryly. "Why should you be so much younger than anybody else in the world? When you grow old there'll be no more youth!"

Mrs. Flaxman's eyes, of a bright greenish-gray, shone gayly into his; then their owner made a displeased mouth. "You may pay me compliments as much as you like. They will not prevent me from telling you that you are one of the most slow-minded people I have ever met!"

"H'm?" said Mr. Manvers, with mild interrogation.

Rose Flaxman repeated her remark, emphasizing with a little tattoo of her teaspoon on the Chippendale tea-tray before her. Manvers studied her, smiling.

"I am entirely ignorant of the grounds of this attack."

"Oh, what hypocrisy!" cried his companion hotly. "I throw out the most tempting of all possible flies, and you absolutely refuse to rise to it."

Manvers considered.

"You expected me to rise to the word 'heretic?'"

"Of course I did! On the same principle as 'sweets to the sweet.' Who—I should like to know—should be interested in heretics if not you?"

"It entirely depends on the species," said her companion cautiously.

"There couldn't be a more exciting species," declared Mrs. Flaxman. "Here you have a Rector of a parish simply setting up another Church of England—services, doctrines and all—off his own bat, so to speak—without a 'with your leave or by your leave'; his parishioners backing him up; his Bishop in a frightful taking and not the least knowing what to do; the fagots all gathering to make a bonfire of him, and a great black six-foot-two Inquisitor ready to apply the match—and yet—I can't get you to take the smallest interest in it! I assure you, Hugh is thrilled."

Manvers laid the finger-tips of two long brown hands lightly against each other.

"Very sorry—but it leaves me quite cold. Heresy in the Church of England comes to nothing. Our heretics are never violent enough. They forget the excellent text about the Kingdom of Heaven! Now the heretics in the Church of Rome are violent. That is what makes them so far more interesting."

"This man seems to be drastic enough!"

"Oh, no!" said the other, gently but firmly incredulous. "Believe me—he will resign, or apologize—they always do."

"Believe me!—you don't—excuse me!—know anything about it. In the first place, Mr. Meynell has got his parishioners—all except a handful—behind him—"

"So had Voysey," interjected Manvers, softly.

Mrs. Flaxman took no notice.

"—And he has hundreds of other supporters—thousands perhaps—and some of them parsons—in this diocese, and outside it. And they are all convinced that they must fight—fight to the death—and not give in. That, you see, is what makes the difference! My brother-in-law"—the voice speaking changed and softened—"died twenty years ago. I remember how sad it was. He seemed to be walking alone in a world that hardly troubled to consider him—so far as the Church was concerned, I mean. There seemed to be nothing else to do but to give up his living. But the strain of doing it killed him."

"The strain of giving up your living may be severe—but, I assure you, your man will find the strain of keeping it a good deal worse."

"It all depends upon his backing. How do you know there isn't a world behind him?" Mrs. Flaxman persisted, as the man beside her slowly shook his head. "Well, now, listen! Hugh and I went to church here last Sunday. I never was so bewildered. First, it was crowded from end to end, and there were scores of people from other villages and towns—a kind of demonstration. Then, as to the service—neither of us could find our way about. Instead of saying the Lord's Prayer four times, we said it once; we left out half the psalms for the day, the Rector explaining from the chancel steps that they were not fit to be read in a Christian church; we altered this prayer and that prayer; we listened to an extempore prayer for the widows and orphans of some poor fellows who have been killed in a mine ten miles from here, which made me cry like baby; and, most amazing of all, when it came to the Creeds—"

Manvers suddenly threw back his head, his face for the first time sharpening into attention. "Ah! Well—what about the Creeds?"

Mrs. Flaxman bent forward, triumphing in the capture of her companion.

"We had both the Creeds. The Rector read them—turning to the congregation—and with just a word of preface—'Here follows the Creed, commonly called the Apostles' Creed,'—or 'Here follows the Nicene Creed.' And we all stood and listened—and nobody said a word. It was the strangest moment! You know—I'm not a serious person—but I just held my breath."

"As though you heard behind the veil the awful Voices—'Let us depart hence?'" said Manvers, after a pause. His expression had gradually changed. Those who knew him best might have seen in it a slight and passing trace of conflicts long since silenced and resolutely forgotten.

"If you mean by that that the church was irreverent—or disrespectful—or hostile—well, you are quite wrong!" cried Mrs. Flaxman impetuously. "It was like a moment of new birth—I can't describe it—as though a Spirit entered in. And when the Rector finished—there was a kind of breath through the church—like the rustling of new leaves—and I thought of the wind blowing where it listed…. And then the Rector preached on the Creeds—how they grew up and why. Fascinating!—why aren't the clergy always telling us such things? And he brought it all round to impressing upon us that some day we might be worthy of another Christian creed—by being faithful—that it would flower again out of our lives and souls—as the old had done…. I wonder what it all meant!" she said abruptly, her light voice dropping.

Manvers smiled. His emotion had quite passed away.

"Ah! but I forgot"—she resumed hurriedly—"we left out several of the Commandments—and we chanted the Beatitudes—and then I found there was a little service paper in the seat, and everybody in the church but Hugh and me knew all about it beforehand!"

"A queer performance," said Manvers, "and of course childishly illegal. Your man will be soon got rid of. I expect you might have applied to him the remark of the Bishop of Cork on the Dean of Cork—'Excellent sermon!—eloquent, clever, argumentative!—and not enough gospel in it to save a tom-tit!"'

Mrs. Flaxman looked at him oddly.

"Well, but—the extraordinary thing was that Hugh made me stay for the second service, and it was as Ritualistic as you like!"

Manvers fell back in his chair, the vivacity on his face relaxing.

"Ah!—is that all?"

"Oh! but you don't understand," said his companion, eagerly. "Of course Ritualistic is the wrong word. Should I have said 'sacramental'? I only meant that it was full of symbolism. There were lights—and flowers, and music, but there was nothing priestly—or superstitious"—she frowned in her effort to explain. "It was all poetic—and mystical—and yet practical. There were a good many things changed in the Service,—but I hardly noticed—I was so absorbed in watching the people. Almost every one stayed for the second service. It was quite short—so was the first service. And a great many communicated. But the spirit of it was the wonderful thing. It had all that—that magic—that mystery—that one gets out of Catholicism, even simple Catholicism, in a village church—say at Benediction; and yet one had a sense of having come out into fresh air; of saying things that were true—true at least to you, and to the people that were saying them; things that you did believe, or could believe, instead of things that you only pretended to believe, or couldn't possibly believe! I haven't got over it yet, and as for Hugh, I have never seen him so moved since—since Robert died."

Manvers was aware of Mrs. Flaxman's affection for her brother-in-law's memory; and it seemed to him natural and womanly that she should be touched—artist and wordling though she was—by this fresh effort in a similar direction. For himself, he was touched in another way: with pity, or a kindly scorn. He did not believe in patching up the Christian tradition. Either accept it—or put it aside. Newman had disposed of "neo-Christianity" once for all.

"Well, of course all this means a row," he said at length, with a smile.
"What is the Bishop doing?"

"Oh, the Bishop will have to prosecute, Hugh says; of course he must! And if he didn't, Mr. Barron would do it for him."

"The gentleman who lives in the White House?"

"Precisely. Ah!" cried Mrs. Flaxman, suddenly, rising to her feet and looking through the open window beside her. "What do you think we've done? We have evoked him! Parlez du diable, etc. How stupid of us! But there's his carriage trotting up the drive—I know the horses. And that's his deaf daughter—poor, downtrodden thing!—sitting beside him. Now then—shall we be at home? Quick!"

Mrs. Flaxman flew to the bell, but retreated with a little grimace.

"We must! It's inevitable. But Hugh says I can't be rude to new people.
Why can't I? It's so simple."

She sat down, however, though rebellion and a little malice quickened the colour in her fair skin. Manvers looked longingly at the door leading to the garden.

"Shall I disappear?—or must I support you?"

"It all depends on what value you set on my good opinion," said Mrs.
Flaxman, laughing.

Manvers resettled himself in his chair.

"I stay—but first, a little information. The gentleman owns land here?"

"Acres and acres. But he only came into it about three years ago. He is on the same railway board where Hugh is Chairman. He doesn't like Hugh, and he certainly won't like me. But you see he's bound to be civil to us. Hugh says he's always making quarrels on the board—in a kind of magnificent, superior way. He never loses his temper—whereas the others would often like to flay him alive. Now then"—Mrs. Flaxman laid a finger on her mouth—"'Papa, potatoes, prunes, and prism'!"

Steps were heard in the hall, and the butler announced "Mr. and Miss
Barron."

A tall man, with an iron-gray moustache and a determined carriage, entered the room, followed by a timid and stooping lady of uncertain age.

Mrs. Flaxman, transformed at once into the courteous hostess, greeted the newcomers with her sweetest smiles, set the deaf daughter down on the hearing side of Mr. Manvers, ordered tea, and herself took charge of Mr. Barron.

* * * * *

The task was not apparently a heavy one. Mrs. Flaxman saw beside her a portly man of fifty-five, with a penetrating look, and a composed manner; well dressed, yet with no undue display. Louis Manvers, struggling with an habitual plague of shyness, and all but silenced by the discovery that his neighbour was even deafer than himself, watched the "six-foot-two Inquisitor" with curiosity, but could find nothing lurid nor torturous in his aspect. There was indeed something about him which displeased a rationalist scholar and ascetic. But his information and ability, his apparent adequacy to any company, were immediately evident. It seemed to Manvers that he had very quickly disarmed Mrs. Flaxman's vague prejudice against him. At any rate she was soon picking his brains diligently on the subject of the neighbourhood and the neighbours, and apparently enjoying the result, to judge from her smiles and her questions.

Mr. Barron indeed had everything that could be expected of him to say on the subject of the district and its population. He descanted on the beauty of the three or four famous parks, which in the eighteenth century had been carved out of the wild heath lands; he showed an intimate knowledge of the persons who owned the parks, and of their families, "though I myself am only a newcomer here, being by rights a Devonshire man"; he talked of the local superstitions with indulgence, and a proper sense of the picturesque; and of the colliers who believed the superstitions he spoke in a tone of general good humour, tempered by regret that "agitators" should so often lead them into folly. The architecture of the district came in, of course, for proper notice. There were certain fine old houses near that Mrs. Flaxman ought to visit; everything of course would be open to her and her husband.

"Oh, tell me," said Mrs. Flaxman, suddenly interrupting him, "how far is
Sandford Abbey from here?"

Her visitor paused a moment before replying.

"Sandford Abbey is about five miles from you—across the park. The two estates meet. Do you know—Sir Philip Meryon?"

Rose Flaxman shrugged her shoulders.

"We know something of him—at least Hugh does. His mother was a very old friend of Hugh's family."

Mr. Barron was silent.

"Is he such a scamp?" said Mrs. Flaxman, raising her fine eyes, with a laugh in them. "You make me quite anxious to see him!"

Mr. Barron echoed the laugh, stiffly.

"I doubt whether your husband will wish to bring him here. He gathers some strange company at the Abbey. He is there now for the fishing."

Manvers inquired who this gentleman might be; and Mrs. Flaxman gave him a lightly touched account. A young man of wealth and family, it seemed, but spoilt from his earliest days, and left fatherless at nineteen, with only an adoring but quite ineffectual mother to take account of. Some notorious love affairs at home and abroad; a wild practical joke or two, played on prominent people, and largely advertised in the newspapers; an audacious novel, and a censored play—he had achieved all these things by the age of thirty, and was now almost penniless, and still unmarried.

"Hugh says that the Abbey is falling into ruin—and that the young man has about a hundred a year left out of his fortune. On this he keeps apparently an army of servants and a couple of hunters! The strange thing is—Hugh discovered it when he went to call on the Rector the other day—that this preposterous young man is a first cousin of Mr. Meynell's. His mother, Lady Meryon, and the Rector's mother were sisters. The Rector, however, seems to have dropped him long ago."

Mr. Barron still sat silent.

"Is he really too bad to talk about?" cried Mrs. Flaxman, impatiently.

"I think I had rather not discuss him," said her visitor, with decision; and she, protesting that Philip Meryon was now endowed with all the charms, both of villainy and mystery, let the subject drop.

Mr. Barron returned, as though with relief, to architecture, talked agreeably of the glories of a famous Tudor house on the west side, and an equally famous Queen Anne house on the east side of the Chase. But the churches of the district, according to him, were on the whole disappointing—inferior to those of other districts within reach. Here, indeed, he showed himself an expert; and a far too minute discourse on the relative merits of the church architecture of two or three of the midland counties flowed on and on through Mrs. Flaxman's tea-making, while the deaf daughter became entirely speechless; and Manvers—disillusioned—gradually assumed an aspect of profound melancholy, which merely meant that his wits were wool gathering.

"Well, I thought Upcote Minor church a very pretty church," said Rose Flaxman at last, with a touch of revolt. "The old screen is beautiful—and who on earth has done all that carving of the pulpit—and the reredos?"

Mr. Barron's expression changed. He bent toward his hostess, striking one hand sharply and deliberately with the glove which he held in the other.

"You were at church last Sunday?"

"I was." Mrs. Flaxman's eyes as she turned them upon him had recovered their animation.

"You were present then," said Mr. Barron with passionate energy, "at a scandalous performance! I feel that I ought to apologize to you and Mr. Flaxman in the name of our village and parish."

The speaker's aspect glowed with what was clearly a genuine fire. The slight pomposity of look and manner had disappeared.

Mrs. Flaxman hesitated. Then she said gravely: "It was certainly very astonishing. I never saw anything like it. But my husband and I liked Mr. Meynell. We thought he was absolutely sincere."

"He may be. But so long as he remains clergyman of this parish it is impossible for him to be honest!"

Mrs. Flaxman slowly poured out another cup of tea for Mr. Manvers, who was standing before her in a drooping attitude, like some long crumpled fly, apparently deaf and blind to what was going on, his hair falling forward over his eyes. At last she said evasively:

"There are a good many people in the parish who seem to agree with him. Except yourself—and a gaunt woman in black who was pointed out to me—everybody in the church appeared to us to be enjoying what the Rector was doing—to be entering into it heart and soul."

Mr. Barron flushed.

"We do not deny that he has got a hold upon the people. That makes it all the worse. When I came here three years ago he had not yet done any of these things—publicly; these perfectly monstrous things. Up to last Sunday, indeed, he kept within certain bounds as to the services; though frequent complaints of his teaching had been made to the Bishop, and proceedings even had been begun—it might have been difficult to touch him. But last Sunday!—" He stopped with a little sad gesture of the hand as though the recollection were too painful to pursue. "I saw, however, within six months of my coming here—he and I were great friends at first—what his teaching was, and whither it was tending. He has taught the people systematic infidelity for years. Now we have the results!"

"He also seems to have looked after their bodies," said Mrs. Flaxman, in a skirmishing tone that simply meant she was not to be brought to close quarters. "I am told that it was he brought the water-supply here; and that he has forced the owners to rebuild some of the worst cottages."

Mr. Barron looked attentively at his hostess. It was as though he were for the first time really occupied with her—endeavouring to place her, and himself with regard to her. His face stiffened.

"That's all very well—excellent, of course. Only, let me remind you, he was not asked to take vows about the water-supply! But he did promise and vow at his ordination to hold the Faith—to 'banish and drive away strange doctrines'!"

"What are 'strange doctrines' nowadays?" said a mild, falsetto voice in the distance.

Barron turned to the speaker—the long-haired dishevelled person whose name he had not caught distinctly as Mrs. Flaxman introduced him. His manner unconsciously assumed a note of patronage.

"No need to define them, I think—for a Christian. The Church has her
Creeds."

"Of course. But while this gentleman shelves them—no doubt a revolutionary proceeding—are there not excesses on the other side? May there not be too much—as well as too little?"

And with an astonishing command of ecclesiastical detail Manvers gave an account—gently ironic here and there—of some neo-Catholic functions of which he had lately been a witness.

Barron fidgeted.

"Deplorable, I admit—quite deplorable! I would put that kind of thing down, just as firmly as the other."

Manvers smiled.

"But who are 'you'? if I may ask it philosophically and without offence? The man here does not agree with you—the people I have been describing would scout you. Where's your authority? What is the authority in the English Church?"

"Well, of course we have our answer to that question," said Barron, after a moment.

Manvers gave a pleasant little laugh. "Have you?"

Barron hesitated again, then evidently found the controversial temptation too strong. He plunged headlong into a great gulf of cloudy argument, with the big word "authority" for theme. But he could find no foothold in the maze. Manvers drove him delicately from point to point, involving him in his own contradictions, rolling him in his own ambiguities, till—suddenly—vague recollections began to stir in the victim's mind. Manvers? Was that the name? It began to recall to him certain articles in the reviews, the Church papers. Was there not a well-known writer—a Dublin man—a man who had once been a clergyman, and had resigned his orders?

He drew himself together with dignity, and retreated in as good order as he could. Turning to Mrs. Flaxman, who was endeavouring to make a few commonplaces audible to Miss Barron, while throwing occasional sly glances toward the field of battle, he somewhat curtly asked for his carriage.

Mrs. Flaxman's hand was on the bell, when the drawing-room door opened to admit a gentleman.

"Mr. Meynell!" said the butler.

And at the same moment a young girl slipped in through the open French window, and with a smiling nod to Mrs. Flaxman and Mr. Manvers went up to the tea-table and began to replenish the teapot and relight the kettle.

Mr. Barron made an involuntary movement of annoyance as the Rector entered. But a few minutes of waiting before the appearance of his carriage was inevitable. He stood motionless therefore in his place, a handsome, impressive figure, while Meynell paid his respects to Mrs. Flaxman, whose quick colour betrayed a moment's nervousness.

"How are you, Barron?" said the Rector from a distance with a friendly nod. Then, as he turned to Manvers, his face lit up.

"I am glad to make your acquaintance!" he said cordially.

Manvers took the outstretched hand with a few mumbled words, but an evident look of pleasure.

"I have just read your Bishop Butler article in the Quarterly," said Meynell eagerly. "Splendid! Have you seen it?" He turned to his hostess, with one of the rapid movements that expressed the constant energy of the man.

Mrs. Flaxman shook her head.

"I am an ignoramus—except about music. I make Mr. Manvers talk to me."

"Oh, but you must read it! I hope you won't mind my quoting a long bit from it?" The speaker turned to Manvers again. "There is a clerical conference at Markborough next week, at which I am reading a paper. I want to make 'em all read you! What? Tea? I should think so!" Then, to his hostess: "Will you mind if I drink a good deal? I have just been down a pit—and the dust was pretty bad."

"Not an accident, I hope?" said Mrs. Flaxman, as she handed him his cup.

"No. But a man had a stroke in the pit while he was at work. They thought he was going to die—he was a great friend of mine—and they sent for me. We got him up with difficulty. He has a bedridden wife—daughters all away, married. Nobody to nurse him as usual. I say!"—he bent forward, looking into his hostess's face with his small, vivacious eyes—"how long are you going to be here—at Maudeley?"

"We have taken the house for a year," said Rose, surprised.

"Will you give me a parish nurse for that time? It won't cost much, and it will do a lot of good," said the Rector earnestly. "The people here are awfully good to each other—but they don't know anything—poor souls—and I can't get the sick folk properly looked after. Will you?"

Mrs. Flaxman's manner showed embarrassment. Within a few feet of her sat the squire of the parish, silent and impassive. Common report made Henry Barron a wealthy man. He could, no doubt, have provided half a dozen nurses for Upcote Minor if he had so chosen. Yet here was she, the newcomer of a few weeks, appealed to instead! It seemed to her that the Rector was not exactly showing tact.

"Won't Mr. Barron help?" She threw a smiling appeal toward him.

Barron, conscious of an irritation and discomfort he had some difficulty in controlling, endeavoured nevertheless to strike the same easy note as the rest. He gave his reasons for thinking that a parish nurse was not really required in Upcote, the women in the village being in his opinion quite capable of nursing their husbands and sons.

But all the time that he was speaking he was chafing for his carriage. His conversation with Mrs. Flaxman was still hot in his ears. It was all very well for Meynell to show this levity, this callous indifference to the situation. But he, Barron, could not forget it. That very week, the first steps had been taken which were to drive this heretical and audacious priest from the office and benefice he had no right to hold, and had so criminally misused. If he submitted and went quietly, well and good. But of course he would do nothing of the kind. There was a lamentable amount of disloyalty and infidelity in the diocese, and he would be supported. An ugly struggle was inevitable—a struggle for the honour of Christ and his Church. It would go down to the roots of things and was not to be settled or smoothed over by a false and superficial courtesy. The days of friendship, of ordinary social intercourse, were over. Barron did not intend to receive the Rector again within his own doors, intimate as they had been at one time; and it was awkward and undesirable that they should be meeting in other people's drawing-rooms.

All these feelings were running through his mind while aloud he was laboriously giving Mrs. Flaxman his reasons for thinking a parish nurse unnecessary in Upcote Minor. When he came to the end of them, Meynell looked at him with amused exasperation.

"Well, all I know is that in the last case of typhoid we had here—a poor lad on Reynolds's farm—his mother got him up every day while she made his bed, and fed him—whatever we could say—on suet dumpling and cheese. He died, of course—what could he do? And as for the pneumonia patients, I believe they mostly eat their poultices—I can't make out what else they do with them—unless I stay and see them put on. Ah, well, never mind. I shall have to get Mrs. Flaxman alone, and see what can be done. Now tell me"—he turned again with alacrity to Manvers—"what's that new German book you quote about Butler? Some uncommonly fine things in it! That bit about the Sermons—admirable!"

He bent forward, his hands on his knees, staring at Manvers. Yet the eyes for all their intensity looked out from a face furrowed and pale—overshadowed by physical and mental strain. The girl sitting at the tea-table could scarcely take her eyes from it. It appealed at once to her heart and her intelligence. And yet there were other feelings in her which resisted the appeal. Once or twice she looked wistfully at Barron. She would gladly have found in him a more attractive champion of a majestic cause.

"What can my coachman be about?" said Barron impatiently. "Might I trouble you, Mrs. Flaxman, to ring again? I really ought to go home." Mrs. Flaxman rang obediently. The butler appeared. Mr. Barron's servants, it seemed, were having tea.

"Send them round, please, at once," said their master, frowning. "At once!"

But the minutes passed on, and while trying to keep up a desultory conversation with his hostess, and with the young lady at the tea-table, to whom he was not introduced, Mr. Barron was all the while angrily conscious of the conversation going on between the Rector and Manvers. There seemed to be something personally offensive and humiliating to himself in the knowledge displayed by these two men—men who had deserted or were now betraying the Church—of the literature of Anglican apologetics, and of the thought of the great Anglican bishop. Why this parade of useless learning and hypocritical enthusiasm? What was Bishop Butler to them? He could hardy sit patiently through it, and it was with most evident relief that he rose to his feet when his carriage was announced.

* * * * *

"How pretty Mrs. Flaxman is!" said his daughter as they drove away. "Yet
I'm sure she's forty, papa."

Her face still reflected the innocent pleasure that Rose Flaxman's kindness had given her. It was not often that the world troubled itself much about her. Her father, however, took no notice. He sat absent and pondering, and soon he stretched out a peremptory hand and lowered the window which his daughter had raised against an east wind to protect a delicate ear and throat which had been the torment of her life. It was done with no conscious unkindness; far from it. He was merely absorbed in the planning of his campaign. The next all-important point was the selection of the Commission of Inquiry. No effort must be spared by the Church party to obtain the right men.

Meanwhile, in the drawing-room which he had left, there was silence for a moment after his departure. Then Meynell said:

"I am afraid I frightened him away. I beg your pardon, Mrs. Flaxman."

Rose laughed, and glanced at the girl sitting hidden behind the tea-table.

"Oh, I had had quite enough of Mr. Barron. Mr. Meynell, have I ever introduced you to my niece?"

"Oh, but we know each other!" said Meynell, eagerly. "We met first at Miss Puttenham's, a week ago—and since then—Miss Elsmere has been visiting a woman I know."

"Indeed?"

"A woman who lost her husband some days since—a terrible case. We are all so grateful to Miss Elsmere."

He looked toward her with a smile and a sigh; then as he saw the shy discomfort in the girl's face, he changed the subject at once.

The conversation became general. Some feeling that she could not explain to herself led Mrs. Flaxman into a closer observation of her niece Mary than usual. There was much affection between the aunt and the niece, but on Mrs. Flaxman's side, at least, not much understanding. She thought of Mary as an interesting creature, with some striking gifts—amongst them her mother's gift for goodness. But it seemed to the aunt that she was far too grave and reserved for her age; that she had been too strenuously brought up, and in a too narrow world. Rose Flaxman had often impatiently tried to enliven the girl's existence, to give her nice clothes, to take her to balls and to the opera. But Mary's adoration for her mother stood in the way.

"And really if she would only take a hand for herself"—thought Mrs.
Flaxman—"she might be quite pretty! She is pretty!"

And she looked again at the girl beside her, wondering a little, as though a veil were lifted from something familiar. Mary was talking—softly, and with a delicate and rather old-fashioned choice of words, but certainly with no lack of animation. And it was quite evident to an inquisitive aunt with a notorious gift for match making that the tired heretic with the patches of coal dust on his coat found her very attractive.

But as the clock struck six Meynell sprang up.

"I must go. Miss Elsmere"—he looked toward her—"has kindly promised to take me on to see your sister at the Cottage—and after to-day I may not have another opportunity." He hesitated, considering his hostess—then burst out: "You were at church last Sunday—I know—I saw you. I want to tell you—that you have a church quite as near to you as the parish church, where everything is quite orthodox—the church at Haddon End. I wish I could have warned you. I—I did ask Miss Elsmere to warn her mother."

Rose looked at the carpet.

"You needn't pity us," she said, demurely. "Hugh wants to talk to you dreadfully. But—I am afraid I am a Gallio."

"Of course—you don't need to be told—it was all a deliberate defiance of the law—in order to raise vital questions. We have never done anything half so bad before. We determined on it at a public meeting last week, and we gave Barron and his friends full warning."

"In short, it is revolution," said Manvers, rubbing his hands gently, "and you don't pretend that it isn't."

"It is revolution!" said Meynell, nodding. "Or a forlorn hope! The laymen in the Church want a real franchise—a citizenship they can exercise—and a law of their own making!"

There was silence a moment. Mary Elsmere took up her hat, and kissed her aunt; Meynell made his farewells, and followed the girl's lead into the garden.

Mrs. Flaxman and Manvers watched them open the gate of the park and disappear behind a rising ground. Then the two spectators turned to each other by a common impulse, smiling at the same thought. Mrs. Flaxman's smile, however, was almost immediately drowned in a real concern. She clasped her hands, excitedly.

"Oh! my poor Catharine! What would she—what would she say?"

CHAPTER IV

Meynell and his companion had taken a footpath winding gently down hill and in a northwest direction across one of the most beautiful parks in England. It lay on the fringe of the Chase and contained, within its slopes and glades, now tracts of primitive woodland whence the charcoal burners seemed to have but just departed; now purple wastes of heather, wild as the Chase itself; or again, dense thickets of bracken and fir, hiding primeval and impenetrable glooms. Maudeley House, behind them, a seemly Georgian pile, with a columnar front, had the good fortune to belong to a man not rich enough to live in or rebuild it, but sufficiently attached to it to spend upon its decent maintenance the money he got by letting it. So the delicately faded beauty of the house had survived unspoilt; while there had never been any money to spend upon the park, where the woods and fences looked after themselves year by year, and colliers from the neighbouring villages poached freely.

The two people walking through the ferny paths leading to the cottage of Forkéd Pond were not, however, paying much attention to the landscape round them. Meynell showed himself at first preoccupied and silent. A load of anxiety depressed his vitality; and on this particular day long hours of literary work and correspondence, beginning almost with the dawn and broken only by the colliery scene of which he had spoken to Mrs. Flaxman, had left deep marks upon him. Yet the girl's voice and manner, and the fragments of talk that passed between them, seemed gradually to create a soothing and liberating atmosphere in which it was possible to speak with frankness, though without effort or excitement.

The Rector indeed had so far very little precise knowledge of what his companion's feeling might be toward his own critical plight. He would have liked to get at it; for there was something in this winning, reserved girl that made him desire her good opinion. And yet he shrank from any discussion with her.

He knew of course that the outlines of what had happened must be known to her. During the ten days since their first meeting both the local and London newspapers had given much space to the affairs of Upcote Minor. An important public meeting in which certain decisions had been taken with only three dissentients had led up to the startling proceedings in the village church which Mrs. Flaxman had described to Louis Manvers. The Bishop had written another letter, this time of a more hurried and peremptory kind. An account of the service had appeared in the Times, and columns had been devoted to it in various Mercian newspapers. After years of silence, during which his heart had burned within him; after a shorter period of growing propaganda and expanding utterance, Meynell realized fully that he had now let loose the floodgates. All round him was rising that wide response from human minds and hearts—whether in sympathy or in hostility—which tests and sifts the man who aspires to be a leader of men—in religion or economics. Every trade union leader lifted on the wave of a great strike, representing the urgent physical need of his fellows, knows what the concentration of human passion can be—in matters concerned with the daily bread and the homes of men. Religion can gather and bring to bear forces as strong. Meynell knew it well; and he was like a man stepping down into a rushing stream from which there is no escape. It must be crossed—that is all the wayfarer knows; but as he feels the water on his body he realizes that the moment is perhaps for life or death.

Such crises in life bring with them, in the case of the nobler personalities, a great sensitiveness; and Meynell seemed to be living in a world where not only his own inner feelings and motives but those of others were magnified and writ large. As he walked beside Mary Elsmere his mind played round what he knew of her history and position; and it troubled him to think that, both for her and her mother, contact with him at this particular moment might be the reviving of old sorrows.

As they paused on the top of a rising ground looking westward he looked at her with sudden and kindly decision.

"Miss Elsmere, are you sure your mother would like to see me? It was very good of you to request that I should accompany you to-night—but—are you sure?"

Mary coloured deeply and hesitated a moment.

"Don't you think I'd better turn back?" he asked her, gently. "Your path is clear before you." He pointed to it winding through the fern. "And you know, I hope, that anything I could do for you and your mother during your stay here I should be only too enchanted to do. The one thing I shrink from doing is to interfere in any way with her rest here. And I am afraid just now I might be a disturbing element."

"No, no! please come!" said Mary, earnestly. Then as she turned her head away, she added: "Of course—there is nothing new—to her—"

"Except that my fight is waged from inside the Church—and your father's from outside. But that might make all the difference to her."

"I don't think so. It is"—she faltered—"the change itself. It is all so terrible to her."

"Any break with the old things? But doesn't it ever present itself to her—force itself upon her—as the upwelling of a new life?" he asked, sadly.

"Ah!—if it didn't in my father's case—"

The girl's eyes filled with tears.

But she quickly checked herself, and they moved on in silence. Meynell, with his pastoral instinct and training, longed to probe and soothe the trouble he divined in her. A great natural dignity in the girl—delicacy of feeling in the man—prevented it.

None the less her betrayal of emotion had altered their relation; or rather had carried it farther. For he had already seen her in contact with tragic and touching things. A day or two after that early morning when he had told the outlines of the Batesons' story to the two ladies who had entertained him at breakfast he had found her in Bateson's cottage with his wife. Bateson was dead, and his wife in that dumb, automaton state of grief when the human spirit grows poisonous to itself. The young girl who came and went with so few words and such friendly timid ways had stirred, as it were, the dark air of the house with a breath of tenderness. She would sit beside the widow, sewing at a black dress, or helping her to choose the text to be printed on the funeral card; or she would come with her hands full of wild flowers, and coax Mrs. Bateson to go in the dusk to the churchyard with them. She had shown, indeed, wonderful inventiveness in filling the first week of loss and anguish with such small incident as might satisfy feeling, and yet take a woman out of herself.

The level sun shone full upon her as she walked beside him, and her face, her simple dress, her attitude stole gradually like a spell on the mind of her companion. It was a remarkable face; the lower lip a little prominent, and the chin firmly rounded. But the smile, though rare, was youth and sweetness itself, and the dark eyes beneath the full mass of richly coloured hair were finely conscious and attentive—disinterested also; so that they won the spectator instead of embarrassing him. She was very lightly and slenderly made, yet so as to convey an impression of strength and physical health. Meynell said to himself that there was something cloistered in her look, like one brought up in a grave atmosphere—an atmosphere of "recollection." At the same time nothing could be merrier—more childish even—than her laugh.

Their talk flowed on, from subject to subject, yet always tending, whether they would or no, toward the matter which was inevitably in both their minds. Insensibly the barrier between them and it broke away. Neither, indeed, forgot the interposing shadow of Catharine Elsmere. But the conversation touched on ideas; and ideas, like fire in stubble, spread far afield. Oxford: the influences which had worked on Elsmere, before Meynell's own youth felt them; men, books, controversies, interwoven for Mary with her father's history, for Meynell with his own; these topics, in spite of misgivings on both sides, could not but reveal them to each other. The growing delight of their conversation was presently beyond Meynell's resisting. And in Mary, the freedom of it, no less than the sense of personal conflict and tragic possibilities that lay behind it, awakened the subtlest and deepest feelings. Poignant, concrete images rushed through her mind—a dying face to which her own had been lifted, as a tiny child; the hall of the New Brotherhood, where she sat sometimes beside her veiled mother; the sad nobility of that mother's life; a score of trifling, heartpiercing things, that, to think of, brought the sob to her throat. Silent revolts of her own too, scattered along the course of her youth, revolts dumb, yet violent; longings for an "ampler ether"—for the great tumultuous clash of thought and doubt, of faith and denial, in a living and daring world. And yet again, times of passionate remorse, in which all movement of revolt had died away; when her only wish had been to smooth the path of her mother, and to soften a misery she but dimly understood.

So that presently she was swept away—as by some released long-thwarted force. And under the pressure of her quick, searching sympathy his talk became insensibly more personal, more autobiographical. He was but little given to confession, but she compelled it. It was as though through his story she sought to understand her father's—to unveil many things yet dark to her.

Thus gradually, through ways direct and indirect, the intellectual story of the man revealed itself to the pure and sensitive mind of the girl. She divined his home and upbringing—his father an Evangelical soldier of the old school, a home imbued with the Puritan and Biblical ideas. She understood something of the struggle provoked—after his ordination, in a somewhat late maturity—by the uprising of the typical modern problems, historical, critical, scientific. She pieced together much that only came out incidentally as to the counsellors within the Church to whom he had gone in his first urgent distress—the Bishop whom he reverenced—his old teachers at Oxford—the new lights at Cambridge.

And the card houses, the frail resting-places, thus built, it seemed, along the route, had lasted long; till at last a couple of small French books by a French priest and the sudden uprush of new life in the Roman Church had brought to the remote English clergyman at once the crystallization of doubt and the passion of a freed faith. "Modernism"—the attempt of the modern spirit, acting religiously, to refashion Christianity, not outside, but inside, the warm limits of the ancient churches—was born; and Richard Meynell became one of the first converts in England.

"Ah, if your father had but lived!" he said at last, turning upon her with emotion. "He died his noble death twenty years ago—think of the difference between then and now! Then the Broad Church movement was at an end. All that seemed so hopeful, so full of new life in the seventies, had apparently died down. Stanley, John Richard Green, Hugh Pearson were dead, Jowett was an old man of seventy; Liberalism within the Church hardly seemed to breathe; the judgment in the Voysey case—as much a defiance of modern knowledge as any Papal encyclical—though people had nearly forgotten it, had yet in truth brought the whole movement to a stand. All within the gates seemed lost. Your father went out into the wilderness, and there, amid everything that was poor and mean and new, he laid down his life. But we!—we are no longer alone, or helpless. The tide has come up to the stranded ship—the launching of it depends now only on the faithfulness of those within it."

Mary was moved and silenced. The man's power, his transparent purity of heart, affected her, as they had already affected thousands. She was drawn to him also, unconsciously, by that something in personality which determines the relations of men and women. Yet there were deep instincts in her that protested. Girl as she was, she felt herself for the moment more alive than he to the dead weight of the World, fighting the tug of those who would fain move it from its ancient bases.

He seemed to guess at her thought; for he passed on to describe the events by which, amid his own dumb or hidden struggle, he had become aware of the same forces working all round him; among the more intelligent and quick-witted miners, hungry for history and science, reading voraciously a Socialist and anti-Christian literature, yet all the while cherishing deep at heart certain primitive superstitions, and falling periodically into hot abysses of Revivalism, under the influence of Welsh preachers; or among the young men of the small middle class, in whom a better education was beginning to awaken a number of new intellectual and religious wants; among women, too, sensitive, intelligent women—

"Ah! but," said Mary, quickly interrupting him, "don't imagine there are many women like Miss Puttenham! There are very, very few!"

He turned upon her with surprise.

"I was not thinking of Miss Puttenham, I assure you. She has taken very little part in this particular movement. I never know whether she is really with us. She stands outside the old things, but I can never make myself happy by the hope that I have been able to win her to the new!"

Mary looked puzzled—interrogative. But she checked her question, and drew him back instead to his narrative—to the small incidents and signs which had gradually revealed to him, among even his brother clergy, years before that date, the working of ideas and thoughts like his own. And now—

He broke off abruptly.

"You have heard of our meeting last week?"

"Of course!"

"There were men there from all parts of the diocese—and some from other counties. It made me think of what a French Catholic Modernist said to me two years ago—'Pius X may write encyclicals as he pleases—I could show him whole dioceses in France that are practically Modernist, where the Seminaries are Modernist, and two thirds of the clergy. The Bishop knows it quite well, and is helpless. Over the border perhaps you get an Ultramontane diocese, and an Ultramontane bishop. But the process goes on. Life and time are for us!'" He paused and laughed. "Ah, of course I don't pretend things are so here—yet. Our reforms in England—in Church and State—broaden slowly down. In France, reform, when it moves at all, tends to be catastrophic. But in the Markborough diocese alone we have won over perhaps a fifth of the clergy, and the dioceses all round are moving. As to the rapidity of the movement in the last few months it has been nothing short of amazing!"

"And what is the end to be? Not only—oh! Not only—to destroy!" said Mary. The soft intensity of the voice, the beauty of the look, touched him strangely.

He smiled, and there was a silence for a minute, as they wandered downward through a purple stretch of heather to a little stream, sun-smitten, that lay across their path. Once or twice she looked at him timidly, afraid lest she might have wounded him.

But at last he said:

"Shall I answer you in the words of a beloved poet?

"'What though there still need effort, strife?
Though much be still unwon?
Yet warm it mounts, the hour of life!
Death's frozen hour is done!

"'The world's great order dawns in sheen
After long darkness rude,
Divinelier imaged, clearer seen,
With happier zeal pursued.

"'What still of strength is left, employ,
This end to help attain—
One common wave of thought and joy
Lifting mankind again!'

"There"—his voice was low and rapid—"there is the goal! a new happiness: to be reached through a new comradeship—a freer and yet intenser fellowship. We want to say to our fellowmen: 'Cease from groping among ruins!—from making life and faith depend upon whether Christ was born at Bethlehem or at Nazareth, whether He rose or did not rise, whether Luke or some one else wrote the Third Gospel, whether the Fourth Gospel is history or poetry. The life-giving force is here, and now! It is burning in your life and mine—as it burnt in the life of Christ. Give all you have to the flame of it—let it consume the chaff and purify the gold. Take the cup of cold water to the thirsty, heal the sick, tend the dying, and feel it thrill within you—the ineffable, the immortal life! Let the false miracle go!—the true has grown out of it, up from it, as the flower from the sheath.' Ah! but then"—he drew himself up unconsciously; his tone hardened—"we turn to the sons of tradition, and we say: 'We too must have our rights in what the past has built up, the past has bequeathed—as well as you! Not for you alone, the institutions, the buildings, the arts, the traditions, that the Christ-life has so far fashioned for itself. They who made them are Our fathers no less than yours—give us our share in them!—we claim it! Give us our share in the cathedrals and churches of our country—our share in the beauty and majesty of our ancestral Christianity.' The men who led the rebellion against Rome in the sixteenth century claimed the plant of English Catholicism. 'We are our fathers' sons, and these things are ours!' they said, as they looked at Salisbury and Winchester. We say the same—with a difference. 'Give us the rights and the citizenship that belong to us! But do not imagine that we want to attack yours. In God's name, follow your own forms of faith—but allow us ours also—within the common shelter of the common Church. We are children of the same God—followers of the same Master. Who made you judges and dividers over us? You shall not drive us into the desert any more. A new movement of revolt has come—an hour of upheaval—and the men, with it!'"

Both stood motionless, gazing over the wide stretch of country—wood beyond wood, distance beyond distance, that lay between them and the Welsh border. Suddenly, as a shaft of light from the descending sun fled ghostlike across the plain, touching trees and fields and farms in its path, two noble towers emerged among the shadows—characters, as it were, that gave a meaning to the scroll of nature. They were the towers of Markborough Cathedral. Meynell pointed to them as he turned to his companion, his face still quivering under the strain of feeling.

"Take the omen! It is for them, in a sense—a spiritual sense—we are fighting. They belong not to any body of men that may chance to-day to call itself the English Church. They belong to England—in her aspect of faith—and to the English people!"

There was a silence. His look came back to her face, and the prophetic glow died from his own. "I should be very, very sorry"—he said anxiously—"if anything I have said had given you pain."

Mary shook her head.

"No—not to me. I—I have my own thoughts. But one must think—of others." Her voice trembled.

The words seemed to suggest everything that in her own personal history had stamped her with this sweet, shrinking look. Meynell was deeply touched. But he did not answer her, or pursue the conversation any farther. He gathered a great bunch of harebells for her, from the sun-warmed dells in the heather; and was soon making her laugh by his stories of colliery life and speech, à propos of the colliery villages fringing the plain at their feet.

* * * * *

The stream, as they neared it, proved to be the boundary between the heath land and the pastures of the lower ground. It ran fresh and brimming between its rushy banks, shadowed here and there by a few light ashes and alders, but in general open to the sky, of which it was the mirror. It shone now golden and blue under the deepening light of the afternoon; and two or three hundred yards away Mary Elsmere distinguished two figures walking beside it—a young man apparently, and a girl. Meynell looked at them absently.

"That's one of the most famous trout-streams in the Midlands. There should be a capital rise to-night. If that man has the sense to put on a sedge-fly, he'll get a creel-full."

"And what is that house among the trees?" asked his companion presently, pointing to a gray pile of building about a quarter of a mile away, on the other side of the stream. "What a wonderful old place!"

For the house that revealed itself stood with an impressive dignity among its stern and blackish woods. The long, plain front suggested a monastic origin; and there was indeed what looked like a ruined chapel at one end. Its whole aspect was dilapidated and forlorn; and yet it seemed to have grown into the landscape, and to be so deeply rooted in it that one could not imagine it away.

Meynell glanced at it.

"That is Sandford Abbey. It belongs, I regret to say, to a neer-do-weel cousin of mine who has spent all his time since he came into it in neglecting his duties to it. Provided the owner of it is safely away, I should advise you and Mrs. Elsmere to walk over and see it one day. Otherwise it is better viewed at a distance. At least those are my own sentiments!"

Mary followed the house with her eyes as they walked along the bank of the stream toward the two figures on the opposite bank.

A sudden exclamation from her companion caught her ear—and a light musical laugh. Startled by something familiar in it, Mary looked across the stream. She saw on the farther bank a few yards ahead a young man fishing, and a young girl in white sitting beside him.

"Hester!—Miss Fox-Wilton!"—the tone showed her surprise; "and who is that with her?"

Meynell, without replying, walked rapidly along the stream to a point immediately opposite the pair.

"Good afternoon, Philip. I did not know you were here. Hester, I am going round by Forkéd Pond, and then home. I shall be glad to escort you."

"Oh! thank you—thank you so much. But it's very nice here. You can't think what a rise there is. I have caught two myself. Sir Philip has been teaching me."

"She frames magnificently!" said the young man. "How d'ye do, Meynell? A long time since we've met."

"A long time," said Meynell briefly. "Hester, will you meet Miss Elsmere and me at the bridge? We sha'n't take you much out of your way."

He pointed to a tiny wooden bridge across the stream, a hundred yards farther down.

A look of mischievous defiance was flung at Meynell across the stream. "I'm all right, I assure you. Don't bother about me. How do you do, Mary? We don't 'miss' each other, do we? Isn't it a lovely evening? Such good luck I wouldn't go with mother to dine at the White House! Don't you hate dinner parties? I told Mr. Barron that spiders were so much more refined than humans—they did at least eat their flies by themselves! He was quite angry—and I am afraid Stephen was too!"

She laughed again, and so did the man beside her. He was a dark, slim fellow, finely made, dressed in blue serge, and a felt hat, which seemed at the moment to be slipping over the back of his handsome head. From a little distance he produced an impression of Apollo-like strength and good looks. As the spectator came closer, this impression was a good deal modified by certain loose and common lines in the face. But from Mary Elsmere's position only Sir Philip Meryon's good points were visible, and he appeared to her a dazzling creature.

And in point of looks his companion was more than his match. They made indeed a brilliant pair, framed amid the light green of the river bank. Hester Fox-Wilton was sitting on a log with her straw hat on her lap. In pushing along the overgrown stream, the coils of her hair had been disarranged and its combs loosened. The hair was of a warm brown shade, and it made a cloud about her headland face, from which her eyes and smile shone out triumphantly. Exceptionally tall, with clear-cut aquiline features, with the movements and the grace of a wood nymph, the girl carried her beautiful brows and her full throat with a provocative and self-conscious arrogance. One might have guessed that fear was unknown to her; perhaps tenderness also. She looked much older than seventeen, until she moved or spoke; then the spectator soon realized that in spite of her height and her precocious beauty she was a child, capable still of a child's mischief.

And on mischief she was apparently bent this afternoon. Mary Elsmere, shyly amused, held aloof, while Meynell and Miss Fox-Wilton talked across the stream. Meynell's peremptory voice reached her now and then, and she could not help hearing a sharp final demand that the truant should transfer herself at once to his escort.

The girl threw him an odd look; she sprang to her feet, flushed, laughed, and refused.

"Very well!" said Meynell. "Then perhaps, as you won't join us, you will allow me to join you. Miss Elsmere, I am very sorry, but I am afraid I must put off my visit to your mother. Will you give her my regrets?"

The fury in Hester's look deepened. She lost her smile.

"I won't be watched and coerced! Why shouldn't I amuse myself as I please!"

Meanwhile Sir Philip Meryon had laid aside his rod and was apparently enjoying the encounter between his companion and the Rector.

"Perhaps you have forgotten—this is my side of the river, Meynell!" he shouted across it.

"I am quite aware of it," said the Rector, as he shook hands with the embarrassed Mary. She was just moving away with a shy good-bye to the angry young goddess on the farther bank, when the goddess said:

"Don't go, Mary! Here, Sir Philip—take the fly-book!" She flung it toward him. "Goodnight."

And turning her back upon him without any further ceremony, she walked quickly along the stream toward the little bridge which Meynell had pointed out.

"Congratulations!" said Meryon, with a mocking wave of the hand to the Rector, who made no reply. He ran to catch up Mary, and the two joined the girl in white at the bridge. The owner of Sandford Abbey stood meanwhile with his hand on his hip watching the receding figures. There was a smile on his handsome mouth, but it was an angry one; and his muttered remark as he turned away belied the unconcern he had affected.

* * * * *

"That comes, you see, of not letting me be engaged to Stephen!" said
Hester in a white heat, as the three walked on together.

Mary looked at her in astonishment.

"I see no connection," was the Rector's quiet reply. "You know very well that your mother does not approve of Sir Philip Meryon, and does not wish you to be in his company."

"Precisely. But as I am not to be allowed to marry Stephen, I must of course amuse myself with some one else. If I can't be engaged to Stephen, I won't be anything at all to him. But, then, I don't admit that I'm bound."

"At present all you're asked"—said Meynell dryly—"is not to disobey your mother. But don't you think it's rather rude to Miss Elsmere to be discussing private affairs she doesn't understand?"

"Why shouldn't she understand them? Mary, my guardian here and my mother say that I mustn't be engaged to Stephen Barron—that I'm too young—or some nonsense of that kind. And Stephen—oh, well, Stephen's too good for this world! If he really loved me, he'd do something desperate, wouldn't he?—instead of giving in. I don't much mind, myself—I don't really care so much about marrying Stephen—only if I'm not to marry him, and somebody else wants to please me, why shouldn't I let him?"

She turned her beautiful wild eyes upon Mary Elsmere. And as she did so Mary was suddenly seized with a strong sense of likeness in the speaker—her gesture—her attitude—to something already familiar. She could not identify the something, but her gaze fastened itself on the face before her.

Meynell meanwhile answered Hester's tirade.

"I'm quite ready to talk this over with you, Hester, on our way home. But don't you see that you are making Miss Elsmere uncomfortable?"

"Oh, no, I'm not," said Hester coolly. "You've been talking to her of all sorts of grave, stupid things—and she wants amusing—waking up. I know the look of her. Don't you?" She slipped her arm inside Mary's. "You know, if you'd only do your hair a little differently—fluff it out more—you'd be so pretty! Let me do it for you. And you shouldn't wear that hat—no, you really shouldn't. It's a brute! I could trim you another in half an hour. Shall I? You know—I really like you. He sha'n't make us quarrel!"

She looked with a young malice at Meynell. But her brow had smoothed, and it was evident that her temper was passing away.

"I don't agree with you at all about my hat," said Mary with spirit. "I trimmed it myself, and I'm extremely proud of it."

Hester laughed out—a laugh that rang through the trees.

"How foolish you are!—isn't she, Rector? No!—I suppose that's just what you like. I wonder what you have been talking to her about? I shall make her tell me. Where are you going to?"

She paused, as Mary and the Rector, at a point where two paths converged, turned away from the path which led back to Upcote Minor. Mary explained again that Mr. Meynell and she were on the way to the Forkéd Pond cottage, where the Rector wished to call upon her mother.

Hester looked at her gravely.

"All right!—but your mother won't want to see me. No!—really it's no good your saying she will. I saw her in the village yesterday. I'm not her sort. Let me go home by myself."

Mary half laughed, half coaxed her into coming with them. But she went very unwillingly; fell completely silent, and seemed to be in a dream all the way to the cottage. Meynell took no notice of her; though once or twice she stole a furtive look toward him.

* * * * *

The tiny house in which Catharine Elsmere and her daughter had settled themselves for the summer stood on a narrow isthmus of land belonging to the Maudeley estate, between the Sandford trout-stream and a large rushy pond of two or three acres. It was a very lonely and a very beautiful place, though the neighbourhood generally pronounced it damp and rheumatic. The cottage, sheltered under a grove of firs, looked straight out on the water, and over a bed of water-lilies. All round was a summer murmur of woods, the call of waterfowl, and the hum of bees; for, at the edges of the water, flowers and grasses pushed thickly out into the sunlight from the shadow of the woods.

By the waterside, with a book on her knee, sat a lady who rose as they came in sight.

Meynell approached her, hat in hand, his strong irregular face, which had always in it a touch of naiveté, of the child, expressing both timidity and pleasure. The memory of her husband was enshrined deep in the minds of all religious liberals; and it was known to many that while the husband and wife had differed widely in opinion, and the wife had suffered profoundly from the husband's action, yet the love between them had been, from first to last, a perfect and a sacred thing.

He saw a tall woman, very thin, in a black dress. Her brown hair, very lightly touched with gray and arranged with the utmost simplicity, framed a face in which the passage of years had emphasized and sharpened all the main features, replacing also the delicate smoothness of youth by a subtle network of small lines and shadows, which had turned the original whiteness of the skin into a brownish ivory, full of charm. The eyes looked steadily out from their deep hollows; the mouth, austere and finely cut, the characteristic hands, and the unconscious dignity of movement—these personal traits made of Elsmere's wife, even in late middle age, a striking and impressive figure.

Yet Meynell realized at once, as she just touched his offered hand, that the sympathy and the homage he would so gladly have brought her would be unwelcome; and that it was a trial to her to see him.

He sat down beside her, while Mary and Hester—who, on her introduction to Mrs. Elsmere, had dropped a little curtsey learnt at a German school, and full of grace—wandered off a little way along the water-side. Meynell, struggling with depression, tried to make conversation—on anything and everything that was not Upcote Minor, its parish, or its church. Mrs. Elsmere's gentle courtesy never failed; yet behind it he was conscious of a steely withdrawal of her real self from any contact with his. He talked of Oxford, of the great college where he had learnt from, the same men who had been Elsmere's teachers; of current books, of the wild flowers and birds of the Chase; he did his best; but never once was there any living response in her quiet replies, even when she smiled.

He said to himself that she had judged him, and that the judgments of such a personality once formed were probably irrevocable. Would she discourage any acquaintance with her daughter? It startled him to feel how much the unspoken question hurt.

Meanwhile the eyes of his hostess pursued the two girls, and she presently called to them, greeting their reappearance with an evident change and relaxation of manner. She made Hester sit near her, and it was not long before the child, throwing off her momentary awe, was chattering fast and freely, yet, as Mary perceived, with a tact, conscious or unconscious, that kept the chatter within bounds.

Mrs. Elsmere watched the girl's beauty with evident delight, and when Meynell rose to go, and Hester with him, she timidly drew the radiant creature to her and kissed her. Hester opened her big eyes with surprise.

Catharine Elsmere sat silent a moment watching the two departing figures; then as Mary found a place in the grass beside her, she said, with some constraint:

"You walked with him from Maudeley?"

"Mr. Meynell? Yes, I found him there at tea. He was very anxious to pay his respects to you; so I brought him."

"I can't imagine why he should have thought it necessary."

Mary colored brightly and suddenly, under the vivacity of the tone. Then she slipped her hand into her mother's.

"You didn't mind, dearest? Aunt Rose likes him very much, and—and I wanted him to know you!" She smiled into her mother's eyes. "But we needn't see him anymore if—"

Mrs. Elsmere interrupted her.

"I don't wish to be rude to any friend of Aunt Rose's," she said, rather stiffly. "But there is no need we should see him, is there?"

"No," said Mary; her cheek dropped against her mother's knee, her eyes on the water. "No—not that I know of." After a moment she added with apparent inconsequence, "You mean because of his opinions?"

Catharine gave a rather hard little laugh.

"Well, of course he and I shouldn't agree; I only meant we needn't go out of our way—"

"Certainly not. Only I can't help meeting him sometimes!"

Mary sat up, smiling, with her hands round her knees.

"Of course."

A pause. It was broken by the mother—as though reluctantly.

"Uncle Hugh was here while you were away. He told me about the service last Sunday. Your father would never—never—have done such a thing!"

The repressed passion with which the last words were spoken startled Mary. She made no reply, but her face, now once more turned toward the sunlit pond, had visibly saddened. Inwardly she found herself asking—"If father had lived?—if father were here now?"

Her reverie was broken by her mother's voice—softened—breathing a kind of compunction.

"I daresay he's a good sort of man."

"I think he is," said Mary, simply.

They talked no more on the subject, and presently Catharine Elsmere rose, and went into the house.

Mary sat on by the water-side thinking. Meynell's aspect, Meynell's words, were in her mind—little traits too and incidents of his parochial life that she had come across in the village. A man might preach and preach, and be a villain! But for a man—a hasty, preoccupied, student man—so to live, through twenty years, among these vigorous, quick-tempered, sharp-brained miners, as to hold the place among them Richard Meynell held, was not to be done by any mere pretender, any spiritual charlatan. How well his voice pleased her!—his tenderness to children—his impatience—his laugh.

The thoughts, too, he had expressed to her on their walk ran kindling through her mind. There were in her many half-recognized thirsts and desires of the spirit that seemed to have become suddenly strong and urgent under the spur of his companionship.

She sat dreaming; then her mother called her to the evening meal, and she went in. They passed the evening together, in the free and tender intimacy which was their habitual relation. But in the mind of each there were hidden movements of depression or misgiving not known to the other.

Meanwhile the Rector had walked home with his ward. A stormy business! For much as he disliked scolding any young creature, least of all, Hester, the situation simply could not be met without a scolding—by Hester's guardian. Disobedience to her mother's wishes; disloyalty toward those who loved her, including himself; deceit, open and unabashed, if the paradox may be allowed—all these had to be brought home to her. He talked, now tenderly, now severely, dreading to hurt her, yet hoping to make his blows smart enough to be remembered. She was not to make friends with Sir Philip Meryon. She was not to see him or walk with him. He was not a fit person for her to know; and she must trust her elders in the matter.

"You are not going to make us all anxious and miserable, dear Hester!" he said at last, hoping devoutly that he was nearly through with his task. "Promise me not to meet this man any more!" He looked at her appealingly.

"Oh, dear, no, I couldn't do that," said Hester cheerfully.

"Hester!"

"I couldn't. I never know what I shall want to do. Why should I promise?"

"Because you are asked to do so by those who love you, and you ought to trust them."

Hester shook her head.

"It's no good promising. You'll have to prevent me."

Meynell was silent a moment. Then he said, not without sternness:

"We shall of course prevent you, Hester, if necessary. But it would be far better if you took yourself in hand."

"Why did you stop my being engaged to Stephen?" she cried, raising her head defiantly.

He saw the bright tears in her eyes, and melted at once.

"Because you are too young to bind yourself, my child. Wait a while, and if in two years you are of the same mind, nobody will stand in your way."

"I sha'n't care a rap about him in two years," said Hester vehemently. "I don't care about him now. But I should have cared about him if I had been engaged to him. Well, now, you and mamma have meddled—and you'll see!"

They were nearing the opening of the lane which led from the main road to North Leigh, Lady Fox-Wilton's house. As she perceived it Hester suddenly took to flight, and her light form was soon lost to view in the summer dusk.

The Rector did not attempt to pursue her. He turned back toward the Rectory, perturbed and self-questioning. But it was not possible, after all, to set a tragic value on the love affair of a young lady who, within a week of its breaking off, had already consoled herself with another swain. Anything less indicative of a broken heart than Hester's behaviour during that week the Rector could not imagine. Personally he believed that she spoke the simple truth when she said she no longer cared for Stephen. He did not believe she ever had cared for him.

Still he was troubled, and on his way toward the Rectory he turned aside. He knew that on his table he should find letters waiting that would take him half the night. But they must lie there a bit longer. At Miss Puttenham's gate he paused, hesitated a moment, then went straight into the twilight garden, where he imagined that he should find its mistress.

He found her, in a far corner, among close-growing trees and with her usual occupations, her books and her embroidery, beside her. But she was neither reading nor sewing. She sprang up to greet him, and for an hour of summer twilight they held a rapid, low-voiced conversation.

When he pressed her hand at parting they looked at each other, still overshadowed by the doubt and perplexity which had marked the opening of their interview. But he tried to reassure her.

"Put from you all idea of immediate difficulty," he said earnestly. "There really is none—none at all. Stephen is perfectly reasonable, and as for the escapade to-day—"

The woman before him shook her head.

"She means to marry at the earliest possible moment—simply to escape from Edith—and that house. We sha'n't delay it long. And who knows what may happen if we thwart her too much?"

"We must delay it a year or two, if we possibly can—for her sake—and for yours," said Meynell firmly. "Good night, my dear friend. Try and sleep—put the anxiety away. When the moment comes—and of course I admit it must come—you will reap the harvest of the love you have sown. She does love you!—I am certain of that."

He heard a low sound—was it a sobbing breath?—as Alice Puttenham disappeared in the darkness which had overtaken the garden.

CHAPTER V

Breakfast at the White House, Upcote Minor, was an affair of somewhat minute regulation.

About a fortnight after Mr. Barron's call on the new tenants of Maudeley Hall, his deaf daughter Theresa entered the dining-room as usual on the stroke of half-past eight. She glanced round her to see that all was in order, the breakfast table ready, and the chairs placed for prayers. Then she went up to a side-table on which was placed a large Bible and prayer-book and a pile of hymn-books. She looked at the lessons and psalms for the day and placed markers in the proper places. Then she chose a hymn, and laid six open hymn-books one upon another. After which she stood for a moment looking at the first verse of the psalm for the day: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." The verse was one of her favourites, and she smiled vaguely, like one who recognizes in the distance a familiar musical phrase.

Theresa Barron was nearly thirty. She had a long face with rather high cheek-bones, and timid gray eyes. Her complexion was sallow, her figure awkward. Her only beauty indeed lay in a certain shy and fleeting charm of expression, which very few people noticed. She passed generally for a dull and plain woman, ill-dressed, with a stoop that was almost a deformity, and a deafness that made her socially useless. But the young servants whom she trained, and the few poor people on her father's estate to whom she was allowed to minister, were very fond of "Miss Theresa." But for her, the owner of Upcote Minor Park would have been even more unpopular than he was, indoors and out. The wounds made by his brusque or haughty manner to his inferiors were to a certain extent healed by the gentleness and the good heart of his daughter. And a kind of glory was reflected on him by her unreasoning devotion to him. She suffered under his hardness or his self-will, but she adored him all the time; nor was her ingenuity ever at a loss for excuses for him. He always treated her carelessly, sometimes contemptuously; but he would not have known how to get through life without her, and she was aware of it.

On this August morning, having rung the bell for the butler, she placed the Bible and prayer-book beside her father's chair, and opening the door between the library and the dining-room, she called, "Papa!"

Through the farther door into the hall there appeared a long procession of servants, headed by the butler, majestically carrying the tea-urn. Something in this daily procession, and its urn-bearer, had once sent Stephen Barron, the eldest son—then an Eton boy just home from school—into an uncontrollable fit of laughter, which had cost him his father's good graces for a week. But the procession had been in no way affected, and at this later date Stephen on his visits home took it as gravely as anybody else.

The tea-urn, pleasantly hissing, was deposited on the white cloth; the servants settled themselves on their chairs, while Theresa distributed the open hymn-books amongst them; and when they were all seated, the master of the house, like a chief actor for whom the stage waits, appeared from the library.

He read a whole chapter from the Bible. It told the story of Gehazi, and he read it with an emphasis which the footman opposite to him secretly though vaguely resented; then Theresa at the piano played the hymn, in which the butler and the scullery-maid supported the deep bass of Mr. Barron and the uncertain treble of his daughter. The other servants remained stolidly silent, the Scotch cook in particular looking straight before her with dark-spectacled eyes and a sulky expression. She was making up her mind that either she must be excused from prayers in future, or Mr. Barron must be content with less cooking for breakfast.

After the hymn, the prayer lasted about ten minutes. Stephen, a fervently religious mind, had often fidgeted under the minute and detailed petitions of it, which seemed to lay down the Almighty's precise course of action toward mankind in general for the ensuing day. But Theresa, who was no less spiritual, under other forms, took it all simply and devoutly, and would have been uncomfortable if any item in the long catalogue had been omitted. When the Amen came, the footman, who never knew what to do with his legs during the time of kneeling, sprang up with particular alacrity.

As soon as the father and daughter were seated at breakfast—close together, for the benefit of Theresa's deafness—Mr. Barron opened the post-bag and took out the letters. They arrived half an hour before breakfast, but were not accessible to any one till the master of the house had distributed them.

Theresa looked up from hers with an exclamation.

"Stephen hopes to get over for dinner to-night!"

"Unfortunate—as I may very probably not see him," said her father, sharply. "I am going to Markborough, and may have to stay the night!"

"You are going to see the Bishop?" asked his daughter, timidly. Her father nodded, adding after a minute, as he began upon his egg:

"However, I must have some conversation with Stephen before long. He knows that I have not felt able to stay my hand to meet his wishes; and perhaps now he will let me understand a little more plainly than I do, what his own position is."

The speaker's tone betrayed bitterness of feeling. Theresa looked pained.

"Father, I am sure—"

"Don't be sure of anything, my dear, with regard to Stephen! He has fallen more and more under Meynell's influence of late, and I more than suspect that when the time comes he will take sides openly with him. It will be a bitter blow to me, but that he doesn't consider. I don't expect consideration from him, either as to that—or other things. Has he been hanging round the Fox-Wiltons lately as usual?"

Theresa looked troubled.

"He told me something the other night, father, I ought to have told you.
Only—"

"Only what? I am always kept in the dark between you."

"Oh, no, father! but it seems to annoy you, when—when I talk about Stephen, so I waited. But the Rector and Lady Fox-Wilton have quite forbidden any engagement between Stephen and Hester. Stephen did propose—and they said—not for two years at least."

"You mean to say that Stephen actually was such a fool?" said her father violently, staring at her.

Theresa nodded.

"A girl of the most headstrong and frivolous character!—a trouble to everybody about her. Lady Fox-Wilton has often complained to me that she is perfectly unmanageable with her temper and her vanity! The worst conceivable wife for a clergyman! Really, Stephen—"

The master of the house pushed his plate away from him in speechless disgust.

"And both Lady Fox-Wilton and the Rector have always taken such trouble about her—much more than about the other children!" murmured Theresa, helplessly.

"What sort of a bringing up do you think Meynell can give anybody?" said her father, turning upon her.

Theresa only looked at him silently, with her large mild eyes. She knew it was of no use to argue. Besides, on the subject of the Rector she very much agreed with her father. Her deafness and her isolation had entirely protected her from Meynell's personal influence.

"A man with no religious principles—making a god of his own intellect—steeped in pride and unbelief—what can he do to train a girl like Hester? What can he do to train himself?" thundered Barron, bringing his hand down on the table-cloth.

"Every one says he is a good man," said Theresa, timidly.

"In outward appearance. What's that? A man like Meynell, who has thrown over the Christian faith, may fall into sin at any moment. His unbelief is the result of sin. He can neither help himself—nor other people—and you need never be surprised to find that his supposed goodness is a mere sham and delusion. I don't say it is always so, of course," he added.

Theresa made no reply, and the subject dropped. Barron returned to his letters, and presently Theresa saw his brow darken afresh over one of them.

"Anything wrong, father?"

"There's always something wrong on this estate. Crawley [Crawley was the head keeper] has caught those boys of John Broad again trespassing and stealing wood in the west plantation! Perfectly abominable! It's the second or third time. I shall give Broad notice at once, and we must put somebody into that cottage who will behave decently!"

"Poor Broad!" said Theresa, with her gentle, scared look. "You know, father, there isn't a cottage to be had in the village—and those boys have no mother—and John works very hard."

"Let him find another cottage all the same," said Barron briefly. "I shall go round, if I do get back from Markborough, and have a talk with him this evening."

There was silence for a little. Theresa was evidently sad. "Perhaps Lady Fox-Wilton would find him something," she said anxiously at last. "His mother was her maid long ago. First she was their schoolroom maid—then she went back to them, when her husband died and John married, and was a kind of maid housekeeper. Nobody knew why Lady Fox-Wilton kept her so long. They tell you in the village she had a shocking temper, and wasn't at all a good servant. Afterward I believe she went to America and I think she died. But she was with them a long while. I daresay they'd do something for John."

Barron made no reply. He had not been listening, and was already deep in other correspondence.

One letter still remained unopened. Theresa knew very well that it was from her brother Maurice, in London. And presently she pushed it toward Barron.

"Won't you open it? I do want to know if it's all right."

Barron opened it, rather unwillingly. His face cleared, however, as he read it.

"Not a bad report. He seems to like the work, and says they treat him kindly. He would like to come down for the Sunday—but he wants some money."

"He oughtn't to!" cried Theresa, flushing. "You gave him plenty."

"He makes out an account," said her father, glancing at the letter; "I shall send him a small cheque. I must say, Theresa, you are always rather inclined to a censorious temper toward your brother."

He looked at her with an unusual vivacity in his hard, handsome face. Theresa hastily excused herself, and the incident dropped. But when breakfast was over and her father had left the room, Theresa remained sitting idly by the table, her eyes fixed on the envelope of Maurice's letter, which had fallen to the floor. Maurice's behaviour was simply disgraceful! He had lost employment after employment by lazy self-indulgence, trusting always to his father's boundless affection for him, and abusing it time after time. Theresa was vaguely certain that he was besmirched by all sorts of dreadful things—drinking, and betting—if not worse. Her woman's instinct told her much more than his father had ever discovered about him. Though at the same time she had the good sense to remind herself that her own small knowledge of the world might lead her to exaggerate Maurice's misdoings. And for herself and Stephen, no less than for her father, Maurice was still the darling and Benjamin of the family, commended to them by a precious mother whose death had left the whole moral structure of their common life insecure.

She was still absorbed in uneasy thoughts about her brother, when the library door opened violently and her father came in with the Markborough Post in his hand.

His face was discomposed; his hand shook. Theresa sprang up.

"What is the matter, father?"

He pointed to the first page of the paper, and to the heading—"Extraordinary meeting at Markborough. Proceedings against the Rector of Upcote. Other clergy and congregations rally to his support."

She read the account with stupefaction. It described a meeting summoned by the "Reformers' Club" of Markborough to consider the announcement that a Commission of Inquiry had been issued by the Bishop of Markborough in the case of the Rector of Upcote Minor, and that legal proceedings against him for heretical teaching and unauthorized services would be immediately begun by certain promoters, as soon as the Bishop's formal consent had been given.

The meeting, it seemed, had been so crowded and tumultuous that adjournment had been necessary from the rooms of the Reformers' Club to the Town Hall. And there, in spite of a strong orthodox opposition, a resolution in support of the Rector of Upcote had been passed, amid scenes of astonishing enthusiasm. Three or four well-known local clergy had made the most outspoken speeches, declaring that there must be room made within the church for the liberal wing, as well as for the Ritualist wing; that both had a right to the shelter of the common and ancestral fold; and that the time had come when the two forms of Christianity now prevailing in Christendom should be given full and equal rights within the Church of the nation.

Meynell himself had spoken, urging on the meeting the profound responsibility resting on the Reformers—the need for gentleness no less than for courage; bidding them remember the sacredness of the ground they were treading, the tenacity and depth of the roots they might be thought to be disturbing.

"Yet at the same time we must fight!—and we must fight with all our strength. For over whole classes of this nation, Christianity is either dying or dead; and it is only we—and the ideas we represent—that can save it."

The speech had been received with deep emotion rather than applause; and the meeting had there and then proceeded to the formation of a "Reformers' League" to extend throughout the diocese. "It is already rumoured," said the Post, "that at least sixteen or eighteen beneficed clergy, with their congregations, have either joined, or are about to join, the Reformers. The next move now lies with the Bishop, and with the orthodox majority of the diocese. If we are not mistaken, Mr. Meynell and his companions in heresy will very soon find out that the Church has still power enough to put down such scandalous rebellions against her power and authority as that of the Rector of Upcote, and to purge her borders of disloyal and revolutionary priests." Theresa looked up. Her face had grown pale. "How terrible, father! Did you know they were to hold the meeting?"

"I heard something about a debate at this precious club. What does that matter? Let them blaspheme in private as they please, it hurts nobody but themselves. But a public meeting at the Bishop's very door—and eighteen of his clergy!"

He paced the room up and down, in an excitement he could hardly control.
"The poor, poor Bishop!" said Theresa, softly, the tears in her eyes.

"He will have the triumph of his life!" exclaimed Barron, looking up. "If there are dry bones on our side, this will put life into them. Those fellows have given themselves into our hands!"

He paused in his walk, falling into a profound reverie in which he lost all sense of his daughter's presence. She dared not rouse him; and indeed the magnitude of the scandal and distress left her speechless. She could only think of the Bishop—their frail, saintly Bishop whom every one loved. At last a clock struck. She said gently:

"Father, I think it is time to go."

Barron started, drew a long breath, gathered up the newspaper, and took a letter from his pocket.

"That is for Maurice. Put in anything you like, but don't miss the morning post."

"Do you see the Bishop this morning, father?"

"No—this afternoon. But there will be plenty to do this morning." He named two or three heads of the church party in Markborough on whom he must call. He must also see his solicitor, and find out whether the counsel whom the promoters of the writ against Meynell desired to secure had been already retained.

He kissed his daughter absently and departed, settling all his home business before he left the house in his usual peremptory manner, leaving behind him indeed in the minds of his butler and head gardener, who had business with him, a number of small but smarting wraths, which would ultimately have to be smoothed away by Theresa.

But when Theresa explored the open envelope he had given her for her brother, she found in it a cheque for £50, and a letter which seemed to Maurice's sister—unselfish and tender as she was—deplorably lacking in the scolding it ought to have contained. If only her father had ever shown the same affection for Stephen!

Meanwhile as Barron journeyed to Markborough, under the shadow of the great Cathedral, quite another voice than his was in possession of the episcopal ear. Precisely at eleven o'clock Richard Meynell appeared on the doorstep of the Palace, and was at once admitted to the Bishop's study.

As he entered the large book-lined room his name was announced in a tone which did not catch the Bishop's attention, and Meynell, as he hesitatingly advanced, became the spectator of a scene not intended for his eyes. On the Bishop's knee sat a little girl of seven or eight. She was crying bitterly, and the Bishop had his arms round her and was comforting her.

[Illustration: "Meynell, as he hesitatingly advanced, became the spectator of a scene not intended for his eyes">[

"There was bogies, grandfather!—there was!—and Nannie said I told lies—and I didn't tell lies."

"Darling, there aren't bogies anywhere—but I'm sure you didn't tell lies. What did you think they were like?"

"Grandfather, they was all black—and they jumped—and wiggled—and spitted—o-o-oh!"

And the child went off in another wail, at which moment the Bishop perceived Meynell. His delicate cheek flushed, but he held up his hand, in smiling entreaty; and Meynell disappeared behind a revolving bookcase.

The Bishop hastily returned to the charge, endeavouring to persuade his little granddaughter that the "bogie" had really been "cook's black cat," generally condemned to the kitchen and blackbeetles, but occasionally let loose to roam the upper floors in search of nobler game. The child dried her eyes, and listened, gravely weighing his remarks. Her face gradually cleared, and when at the end he said slyly, "And even if there were bogies, little girls shouldn't throw hairbrushes at their Nannies!" she nodded a judicial head, adding plaintively:

"But then Nannies mustn't talk all the time, grandfather! Little girls must talk a itty itty bit. If Nannies not let them, little girls must frow somefing at Nannies."

The Bishop laughed—a low, soft sound, from which Meynell in the distance caught the infection of mirth.

A few murmured words—no doubt a scolding—and then:

"Are you good, Barbara?"

"Ye-s," said the child, slowly—"not very."

"Good enough to say you're sorry to Nannie?"

The child smiled into his face.

"Go along then, and say it!" said the Bishop, "and mind you say it nicely."

Barbara threw her arm round his neck and hugged him passionately. Then he set her down, and she ran happily away, through a door at the farther end of the room.

Meynell advanced, and the Bishop came to meet him. Over both faces, as they approached each other, there dropped a sudden shadow—a tremor as of men who knew themselves on the brink of a tragical collision—decisive of many things. And yet they smiled, the presence of the child still enwrapping them.

"Excuse these domesticities," said the Bishop, "but there was such woe and lamentation just before you came. And childish griefs go deep. Bogies—of all kinds—have much to answer for!"

Then the Bishop's smile disappeared. He beckoned Meynell to a chair, and sat down himself.

Francis Craye, Bishop of Markborough, was physically a person of great charm. He was small—not more than five foot seven; but so slenderly and perfectly made, so graceful and erect in bearing, that his height, or lack of it, never detracted in the smallest degree from his dignity, or from the reverence inspired by the innocence and unworldliness of his character. A broad brow, overshadowing and overweighting the face, combined, with extreme delicacy of feature, a touch of emaciation, and a pure rose in the alabaster of the cheeks, to produce the aspect of a most human ghost—a ghost which had just tasted the black blood, and recovered for an hour all the vivacity of life. The mouth, thin-lipped and mobile to excess, was as apt for laughter as for tenderness; the blue eyes were frankness and eagerness itself. And when the glance of the spectator pursued the Bishop downward, it was to find that his legs, in the episcopal gaiters, were no less ethereal than his face; while his silky white hair added the last touch of refinement to a personality of spirit and fire.

Meynell was the first to speak.

"My lord! let me begin this conversation by once more thanking you—from my heart—for all the personal kindness that you have shown me in the last few months, and in the correspondence of the last fortnight."

His voice wavered a little. The Bishop made no sign.

"And perhaps," Meynell resumed, "I felt it the kindest thing of all that—after the letters I have written you this week—after the meeting of yesterday—you should have sent me that telegram last night, saying that you wished to see me to-day. That was like you—that touched me indeed!" He spoke with visible emotion.

The Bishop looked up.

"There can be no question, Meynell, of any personal enmity between yourself and me," he said gravely. "I shall act in the matter entirely as the responsibilities of my office dictate—that you know. But I have owed you much in the past—much help—much affection. This diocese owes you much. I felt I must make one last appeal to you—terrible as the situation has grown. You could not have foreseen that meeting of yesterday!" he added impetuously, raising his head.

Meynell hesitated.

"No, I had no idea we were so strong. But it might have been foreseen. The forces that brought it about have been rising steadily for many years."

There was no answer for a moment. The Bishop sat with clasped hands, his legs stretched out before him, his white head bent. At last, without moving, he said:

"There are grave times coming on this diocese, Meynell—there are grave times coming on the Church!"

"Does any living church escape them?" said Meynell, watching him—with a heavy heart.

The Bishop shook his head.

"I am a man of peace. Where you see a hope of victory for what you think, no doubt, a great cause, I see above the mêlée, Strife and Confusion and Fate—"red with the blood of men." What can you—and those who were at that meeting yesterday—hope to gain by these proceedings? If you could succeed, you would break up the Church, the strongest weapon that exists in this country against sin and selfishness—and who would be the better?"

"Believe me—we sha'n't break it up."

"Certainly you will! Do you imagine that men who are the spiritual sons and heirs of Pusey and Liddon are going to sit down quietly in the same church with you and the eighteen who started this League yesterday? They would sooner die."

Meynell bore the onslaught quietly.

"It depends upon our strength," he said slowly, "and the strength we develop, as the fight goes on."

"Not at all!—a monstrous delusion!" The Bishop raised an indignant brow. "If you overwhelmed us—if you got the State on your side, as in France at the Revolution—you would still have done nothing toward your end—nothing whatever! We refuse—we shall always refuse—to be unequally yoked with those who deny the fundamental truths of the Faith!"

"My lord, you are so yoked at the present moment," said Meynell firmly—the colour had flashed back into his cheeks—"it is the foundation of our case that half the educated men and women we gather into our churches to-day are—in our belief—Modernists already. Question them!—they are with us—not with you. That is to say, they have tacitly shaken off the old forms—the Creeds and formularies that bind the visible, the legal, church. They do not even think much about them. Forgive me if I speak plainly! They are not grieving about the old. Their soul—those of them, I mean that have the gift of religion—is travailing—dumbly travailing—with the new. Slowly, irresistibly, they are evolving for themselves new forms, new creeds, whether they know it or not. You—the traditional party—you, the bishops and the orthodox majority—can help them, or hinder them. If you deny them organized expression and outlet, you prolong the dull friction between them and the current Christianity. You waste where you might gather—you quench where you might kindle. But there they are—in the same church with you—and you cannot drive them out!"

The Bishop made a sound of pain.

"I wish to drive no one out," he said, lifting a diaphanous hand. "To his own master let each man stand or fall. But you ask us—us, the appointed guardians of the Faith—the ecclesia docens—the historic episcopate—to deny and betray the Faith! You ask us to assent formally to the effacing of all difference between Faith and Unfaith—you bid us tell the world publicly that belief matters nothing—that a man may deny all the Divine Facts of Redemption, and still be as good a Christian as any one else. History alone might tell you—and I am speaking for the moment as a student to a student—that the thing is inconceivable!"

"Unless—solvitur vivendo!" said Meynell in a low voice. "What great change in the religious life of men has not seemed inconceivable—till it happened? Think of the great change that brought this English Church into being! Within a couple of generations men had to learn to be baptized, and married, and buried, with rites unknown to their fathers—to stand alone and cut off from the great whole of Christendom—to which they had once belonged—to see the Mass, the cult of Our Lady and the Saints, disappear from their lives. What change that any Modernist proposes could equal that? But England lived through it!—England emerged!—she recovered her equilibrium. Looking back upon it all now, we see—you and I agree there—that it was worth while—that the energizing, revealing power behind the world was in the confusion and the dislocation; and that England gained more than she lost when she made for herself an English and a national Church in these islands, out of the shattered débris of the Roman System."

He bent forward, and looked intently into the Bishop's face. "What if another hour of travail be upon us? And is any birth possible without pain?"

"Don't let us argue the Reformation!" said the Bishop, with a new sharpness of note. "We should be here all night. But let me at least point out to you that the Church kept her Creeds!—the Succession!—the four great Councils!—the unbroken unity of essential dogma. But you"—he turned with renewed passion on his companion—"what have you done with the Creeds? Every word in them steeped in the heart's blood of generations!—and you put them aside as a kind of theological bric-à-brac that concerns us no more. Meynell!—you have no conception of the forces that this movement of yours, if you persist in it, will unchain against you! You are like children playing with the lightning!"

Denunciation and warning sat with a curious majesty on the little Bishop as he launched these words. It was with a visible effort that Meynell braced himself against them.

"Perhaps I estimate the forces for and against differently from yourself, Bishop. But when you prophesy war, I agree. There will be war!—and that makes the novelty of the situation. Till now there has never been equality enough for war. The heretic has been an excrescence to be cut away. Now you will have to make some terms with him! For the ideas behind him have invaded your inmost life. They are all about you and around you—and when you go out to fight him, you will discover that you are half on his side!"

"If that means," said the Bishop impatiently, "that the Church is accessible to new ideas—that she is now, as she has always been, a learned Church—the Church of Westcott and Lightfoot, of a host of younger scholars who are as well acquainted with the ideas and contentions of Modernism—as you call it—as any Modernist in Europe—and are still the faithful servants and guardians of Christian dogma—why, then, you say what is true! We perfectly understand your positions—and we reject them."

Through Meynell's expression there passed a gleam—slight and gentle—of something like triumph.

"Forgive me!—but I think you have given me my point. Let me recall to you the French sayings—'Comprendre, c'est pardonner—Comprendre, c'est aimer.' It is because for the first time you do understand them—that, for the first time, the same arguments play upon you as play upon us—it is for that very reason that we regard the field as half won, before the battle is even joined."

The Bishop gazed upon him with a thin, dropping lip—an expression of suffering in the clear blue eyes.

"That Christians"—he said under his breath—"should divide the forces of Christ—with the sin and misery of this world devouring and defiling our brethren day by day!"

"What if it be not 'dividing'—but doubling—the forces of Christ!" said Meynell, with pale resolution. "All that we ask is the Church should recognize existing facts—that organization should shape itself to reality. In our eyes, Christendom is divided to-day—or is rapidly dividing itself—into two wholly new camps. The division between Catholic and Protestant is no longer the supreme division; for the force that is rising affects both Protestant and Catholic equally. Each of the new divisions has a philosophy and a criticism of its own; each of them has an immense hold on human life, though Modernism is only now slowly realizing and putting out its power. Two camps!—two systems of thought!—both of them Christian thought. Yet one of them, one only, is in possession of the churches, the forms, the institutions; the other is everywhere knocking at the gates. 'Give us our portion!'—we say—'in Christ's name.' But only our portion! We do not dream of dispossessing the old—it is the last thing, even, that we desire. But for the sake of souls now wandering and desolate, we ask to live side by side with the old—in brotherly peace, in equal right—sharing what the past has bequeathed! Yes, even the loaves and fishes!—they ought to be justly divided out like the rest. But, above all, the powers, the opportunities, the trials, the labours of the Christian Church!"

"In other words, so far as the English Church is concerned, you propose to reduce us within our own borders to a peddling confusion of sects, held together by the mere physical link of our buildings and our endowments!" said the Bishop, as he straightened himself in his chair.

He spoke with a stern and contemptuous force which transformed the small body and sensitive face. In the old room, the library of the Palace, with its rows of calf-bound folios, and its vaulted fifteenth century roof, he sat as the embodiment of ancient, inherited things, his gentleness lost in that collective, that corporate, pride which has been at once the noblest and the deadliest force in history.

Meynell's expression changed, in correspondence. It, too, grew harder, more challenging.

"My lord—is there no loss already to be faced, of another kind?—is all well with the Church? How often have I found you here—forgive me!—grieving for the loss of souls—the decline of faith—the empty churches—the dwindling communicants—the spread of secularist literature—the hostility of the workmen! And yet what devotion, what zeal, there is in this diocese, beginning with our Bishop. Have we not often asked ourselves what such facts could possibly mean—why God seemed to have forsaken us?"

"They mean luxury and selfishness—the loss of discipline at home and abroad," said the Bishop, with bitter emphasis. "It is hard indeed to turn the denial of Christ into an argument against His Gospel!"

Meynell was silent. His heart was burning within him with a passionate sense at once of the vast need and hungry unrest so sharply dismissed by the Bishop, and of the efficacy of that "new teaching" for which he stood. But he ceased to try and convey it by argument. After a few moments he began in his ordinary voice to report various developments of the Movement in the diocese of which he believed the Bishop to be still ignorant.

"We wish to conceal nothing from you," he said at last with emotion; "and consistently with the trial of strength that must come, we desire to lighten the burden on our Bishop as much as we possibly can. This will be a solemn testing of great issues—we on our side are determined to do nothing to embitter or disgrace it."

The Bishop, now grown very white, looked at him intently.

"I make one last appeal, Meynell, to your obedience—and to the promises of your ordination."

"I was a boy then"—said Meynell slowly—"I am a man now. I took those vows sincerely, in absolute good faith; and all the changes in me have come about, as it seems to me, by the inbreathing of a spirit not my own—partly from new knowledge—partly in trying to help my people to live—or to die. They represent to me things lawfully—divinely—learnt. So that in the change itself, I cannot acknowledge or feel wrongdoing. But you remind me—as you have every right to do—that I accepted certain rules and conditions. Now that I break them, must I not resign the position dependent on them? Clearly, if it were a question of any ordinary society. But the Christian Church is not an ordinary society! It is the sum of Christian life!"

The Bishop raised a hand of protest, but without speaking. Meynell resumed:

"And that Life makes the Church—moulds it afresh, from age to age. There are times—we hold—when the Church very nearly expresses the Life; there are others when there are great discordances between the Life, and its expression in the Church. We believe that there are such discordances now because—once more—of a New Learning. And we believe that to withdraw from the struggle to make the Church more fully represent the Life would be sheer disloyalty and cowardice. We must stay it out, and do our best. We are not dishonest, for, unlike many Liberals of the past and the present—we speak out! We are inconsistent indeed with a past pledge; but are we any more inconsistent than the High Churchman who repudiates the 'blasphemous fables' of the Mass when he signs the Articles, and then encourages adoration of the Reserved Sacrament in his church?"

The Bishop made no immediate reply. He was at that moment involved in a struggle with an incumbent in Markborough itself who under the very shadow of the Cathedral had been celebrating the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin in flat disobedience to his diocesan. His mind wandered for a minute or two to this case. Then, rousing himself, he said abruptly, with a keen look at Meynell:

"I know of course that, in your case, there can be no question of clinging to the money of the Church."

Meynell flushed.

"I had not meant to speak of it—but your lordship knows that all I receive from my living is given back to church purposes. I support myself by what I write. There are others of us who risk much more than I—who risk indeed their all!"

"You have done a noble work for your people, Meynell." The Bishop's voice was not unlike a groan.

"I have done nothing but what was my bounden duty to do."

"And practically your parish is with you in this terrible business?"

"The church people in it, by an immense majority—and some of the dissenters. Mr. Barron, as you know, is the chief complainant, and there are of course some others with him."

"I expect to see Mr. Barron this afternoon," remarked the Bishop, frowning.

Meynell said nothing.

The Bishop rose.

"I understand from your letter this morning that you have no intention of repeating the service of last Sunday?"

"Not at present. But the League will go to work at once on a revised service-book."

"Which you propose to introduce on a given Sunday—in all the Reformers' churches?"

"That is our plan."

"You are quite aware that this whole scheme may lead to tumults—breaches of the peace?"

"It may," said Meynell reluctantly.

"But you risk it?"

"We must," said Meynell, after a pause.

"And you refuse—I ask you once more—to resign your living, at my request?"

"I do—for the reasons I have given."

The Bishop's eyes sparkled.

"As to my course," he said, dryly, "Letters of Request will be sent at once to the Court of Arches preferring charges of heretical teaching and unauthorized services against yourself and two other clergy. I shall be represented by so-and-so." He named the lawyers.

They stood, exchanging a few technical informations of this kind for a few minutes. Then Meynell took up his hat. The Bishop hesitated a moment, then held out his hand.

Meynell grasped it, and suddenly stooped and kissed the episcopal ring.

"I am an old man"—said the Bishop brokenly—"and a weary one. I pray God that He will give me strength to bear this burden that is laid upon me."

Meynell went away, with bowed head. The Bishop was left alone. He moved to the window and stood looking out. Across the green of the quadrangle rose the noble mass of the Cathedral. His lips moved in prayer; but all the time it was as though he saw beside the visible structure—its ordered beauty, its proud and cherished antiquity—a ruined phantom of the great church, roofless and fissured, its sacred places open to the winds and rains, its pavements broken and desolate.

The imagination grew upon him, and it was only with a great effort that he escaped from it.

"My bogies are as foolish as Barbara's," he said to himself with a smile as he went back to the daily toil of his letters.

CHAPTER VI

Meynell left the Palace shaken and exhausted. He carried in his mind the image of his Bishop, and he walked in bitterness of soul. The quick, optimistic imagination which had alone made the action of these last weeks possible had for the moment deserted him, and he was paying the penalty of his temperament.

He turned into the Cathedral, and knelt there some time, conscious less of articulate prayer than of the vague influences of the place; the warm gray of its shadows, the relief of its mere space and silence, the beauty of the creeping sunlight—gules, or, and purple—on the spreading pavements. And vaguely—while the Bishop's grief still, as it were, smarted within his own heart—there arose the sense that he was the mere instrument of a cause; that personal shrinking and compunction were not allowed him; that he was the guardian of nascent rights and claims far beyond anything affecting his own life. Some such conviction is essential to the religious leader—to the enthusiast indeed of any kind; and it was not withheld from Richard Meynell.

When he rose and went out, he saw coming toward him a man he knew well—Fenton, the Vicar of a church on the outskirts of Markborough, famous for its "high" doctrine and services; a young boyish fellow, curly haired, in whom the "gayety" that Catholicism, Anglican or Roman, prescribes to her most devout children was as conspicuous as an ascetic and labourious life. Meynell loved and admired him. At a small clerical meeting the two men had once held an argument that had been long remembered—Fenton maintaining hotly the doctrine of an intermediate and purgatorical state after death, basing it entirely on a vision of Saint Perpetua recorded in the Acta of that Saint. Impossible, said the fair-haired, frank-eyed priest—who had been one of the best wicket-keeps of his day at Winchester—that so solemn a vision, granted to a martyr, at the moment almost of death, could be misleading. Purgatory therefore must be accepted and believed, even though it might not be expedient to proclaim it publicly from an Anglican pulpit. "Since the evening when I first read the Acta of SS. Perpetua and Felicitas," said the speaker, with an awed sincerity, "I have never doubted for myself, nor have I dared to hide from my penitents what is my own opinion."

In reply, Meynell, instead of any general argument, had gently taken the very proof offered him—i.e., the vision—dissecting it, the time in which it arose, and the mind in which it occurred, with a historical knowledge and a quick and tender penetration which had presently absorbed the little company of listeners, till Fenton said abruptly, with a frown of perplexity:

"In that way, one might explain anything—the Transfiguration for instance—or Pentecost."

Meynell looked up quickly.

"Except—the mind that dies for an idea!"

Yet the encounter had left them friends; and the two men had been associated not long afterward in a heroic attempt to stop some dangerous rioting arising out of a strike in one of the larger collieries.

Meynell watched the young figure of Fenton approaching through the bands of light and shadow in the great nave. As it came nearer, some instinct made him stand still, as though he became the mere spectator of what was about to happen. Fenton lifted his head; his eyes met Meynell's, and, without the smallest recognition, his gaze fixed on the pavement, he passed on toward the east end of the Cathedral.

Meynell straightened himself for a minute's "recollection," and went his way. On the pavement outside the western portal he ran into another acquaintance—a Canon of the Cathedral—hurrying home to lunch from a morning's work in the Cathedral library. Canon France looked up, saw who it was, and Meynell, every nerve strained to its keenest, perceived the instant change of expression. But there was no ignoring him, though the Canon did not offer to shake hands.

"Ah! Meynell, is that you? A fine day at last!"

"Yes, we may save the harvest yet!" said Meynell, pausing in his walk.

A kind of nervous curiosity bade him try and detain the Canon. But France—a man of sixty-five, with a large Buddha-like face, and a pair of remarkably shrewd and humorous black eyes—looked him quickly over from top to toe, and hurried on, throwing a "good-bye" over his shoulder. When he and Meynell had last met it had been to talk for a friendly hour over Monseigneur Duchesne's last book and its bearing on Ultramontane pretensions; and they had parted with a cordial grip of the hand, promising soon to meet again.

"Yet he knew me for a heretic then!" thought Meynell. "I never made any secret of my opinions."

All the same, as he walked on, he forced himself to acknowledge to the full the radical change in the situation. Acts of war suspend the normal order; and no combatant has any right to complain.

Then a moment's weariness seized him of the whole train of thought to which his days and nights were now committed, and he turned with eagerness to look at the streets of Markborough, full of a market-day crowd, and of "the great mundane movement." Farmers and labourers were walking up and down; oxen and sheep in the temporary pens of the market-place were waiting for purchasers; there was a Socialist lecturer in one corner, and a Suffragist lady on a wagon in another. The late August sun shone upon the ruddy faces and broad backs of men to whom certainly it did not seem to be of great importance whether the Athanasian Creed were omitted from the devotions of Christian people or no. There was a great deal of chaffering going on; a little courting, and some cheating. Meynell recognized some of his parishioners, spoke to a farmer or two, exchanged greeting with a sub-agent of the miners' union, and gave some advice to a lad of his choir who had turned against the pits and come to "hire" himself at Markborough.

It was plain to him, however, after a little, that although he might wish to forget himself among the crowd, the crowd was on the contrary rather sharply aware of the Rector of Upcote. He perceived as he moved slowly up the street that he was in fact a marked man. Looks followed him; and the men he knew greeted him with a difference.

A little beyond the market-place he turned down a narrow street leading to the mother church of the town—an older foundation even than the Cathedral. Knocking at the door in the wall, he was admitted to an old rectory house, adjacent to the church, and in its low-ceiled dining-room he found six of the already famous "eighteen" assembled, among them the two other clergy who with himself had been singled out for the first testing prosecution. A joint letter was being drawn up for the press.

Meynell was greeted with rejoicing—a quiet rejoicing, as of men occupied with grave matters, that precluded any ebullience of talk. With Meynell's appearance, the meeting became more formal, and it was proposed to put the Vicar of the ancient church under whose shadow they were gathered, into the chair. The old man, Treherne by name, had been a double-first in days when double-firsts were everything, and in a class-list not much more modern than Mr. Gladstone's. He was a gentle, scholarly person, silent and timid in ordinary life, and his adhesion to the "eighteen" had been an astonishment to friends and foes. But he was not to be inveigled into the "chair" on any occasion, least of all in his own dining-room.

"I should keep you here all night, and you would get nothing done," he said with a smiling wave of the hand. "Besides—excludat jurgia finis!—let there be an age-limit in all things! Put Meynell in. It is he that has brought us all into this business."

So, for some hours or more, Meynell and the six grappled with the letter that was to convey the challenge of the revolted congregations to the general public through the Times. It was not an easy matter, and some small jealousies and frictions lifted their heads that had been wholly lost sight of in the white-hot feeling of the inauguration meeting.

Yet on the whole the seven men gathered in this room were not unworthy to lead the "forlorn hope" they had long determined on. Darwen—young, handsome, Spiritual, a Third Classic, and a Chancellor's medallist; Waller, his Oxford friend, a man of the same type, both representing the recent flowing back of intellectual forces into the Church which for nearly half a century had abandoned her; Petitôt, Swiss by origin, small, black-eyed, irrepressible, with a great popularity among the hosiery operatives of whom his parish was mainly composed; Derrick, the Socialist, of humble origin and starved education, yet possessed Of a natural sway over men, given him by a pair of marvellous blue eyes, a character of transparent simplicity, a tragic honesty and the bitter-sweet gift of the orator; Chesham, a man who had left the army for the Church, had been grappling for ten years with a large parish of secularist artisans, and was now preaching Modernism with a Franciscan fervour and success; and Rollin, who owned a slashing literary style, was a passionate Liberal in all fields, had done excellent work in the clearing and cleaning of slums, with much loud and unnecessary talk by the way, and wrote occasionally for the Daily Watchman. Chesham and Darwen were Meynell's co-defendants in the suit brought by the Bishop.

Rollin alone seemed out of place in this gathering of men, drawing tense breath under a new and almost unbearable responsibility. He was so in love with the sensational, notoriety side of the business, so eager to pull wires, and square editors, so frankly exultant in the "big row" coming on, that Meynell, with the Bishop's face still in his mind, could presently hardly endure him. He felt as Renan toward Gavroche. Was it worth while to go through so much that Rollin might cut a figure, and talk at large about "modern thought?"

However Darwen and Waller, Derrick also, were just as determined as Meynell to keep down the frothy self-advertising element in the campaign to the minimum that human nature seems unable to do without. So that Rollin found himself gradually brought into line, being not a bad fellow, but only a common one; and he abandoned with much inward chagrin the project of a flaming "interview" for the Daily Watchman on the following day.

And indeed, as this handful of men settled down to the consideration of the agenda for a large conference to be held in Markborough the following week, there might have been discerned in six of them, at least, a temper that glorified both them and their enterprise; a temper of seriousness, courage, unalterable conviction, with such delicacy of feeling as befits men whose own brethren and familiar companions have become their foes. They were all pastors in the true sense, and every man of them knew that in a few months he would probably have lost his benefice and his prospects. Only Treherne was married, and only he and Rollin had private means.

Meynell was clearly their leader. Where the hopefulness of the others was intermittent his was constant; his knowledge of the English situation generally, as well as of the lie of forces in the Markborough district, was greater than theirs; and his ability as a writer made him their natural exponent. It was he who drew up the greater part of their "encyclical" for the press; and by the time the meeting was over he had so heightened in them the sense of mission, so cheered them with the vision of a wide response from the mind of England, that all lesser thoughts were sunk, and they parted in quietness and courage.

Meynell left the outskirts of Markborough by the Maudeley road, meaning to walk to Upcote by Forkéd Pond and Maudeley Park.

It was now nearly a fortnight since he had seen Mary Elsmere, and for the first time, almost, in these days of storm and stress could the mind make room for some sore brooding on the fact. He had dined at Maudeley, making time with infinite difficulty; Mrs. Elsmere and her daughter were not there. He had asked Mrs. Flaxman to tea at the Rectory, and had suggested that she should bring her sister and her niece. Mr. and Mrs. Flaxman appeared—without companions. Once or twice he had caught sight of Mary Elsmere's figure in the distance of Miss Puttenham's garden. Yet he had not ventured to intrude upon the two friends. It had seemed to him by then it must be her will to avoid him, and he respected it.

As to other misgivings and anxieties, they were many. As Meynell entered the Maudeley lane, with the woods of Sandford Abbey on his left, and the little trout-stream flashing and looping through the water meadows on his right, his mind was often occupied by a conversation between himself and Stephen Barron which had taken place the night before. Meynell could not but think of it remorsefully.

"And I can explain nothing—to make it easier for the poor old fellow—nothing! He thinks if we had allowed the engagement, it would all have come right—he would have got a hold upon her, and been able to shape her. Oh, my dear boy—my dear boy! Yet, when the time comes, Stephen shall have any chance, any help, I can give him—unless indeed she has settled her destiny for herself by then, without any reference to us. And Stephen shall know—what there is to know!"

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.

The remembrance rebuked him, and he fell into fresh plans about the child. She must be sent away at once!—and if there were really any sign of entanglement he must himself go to Sandford and beard Philip in his den. There was knowledge in his possession that might be used to frighten the fellow. He thought of his cousin with loathing and contempt.

But—to do him justice—Meryon knew nothing of those facts that gave such an intolerable significance to any contact whatever between his besmirched life and that of Hester Fox-Wilton.

Meryon knew nothing—and Stephen knew nothing—nor the child herself. Meynell shared his knowledge with only two other persons—no!—three. Was that woman, that troublesome, excitable woman, whose knowledge had been for years the terror of three lives—was she alive still? Ralph Fox-Wilton had originally made it well worth her while to go to the States. That was in the days when he was prepared to pay anything. Then for years she had received an allowance, which, however, Meynell believed had stopped sometime before Sir Ralph's death. Meynell remembered that the stopping of it had caused some friction between Ralph and his wife. Lady Fox-Wilton had wished it continued. But Ralph had obstinately refused to pay any more. Nothing had been heard of her, apparently, for a long while. But she had still a son and grand-children living in Upcote village.

* * * * *

Meynell opened the gate leading into the Forkéd Pond enclosure. The pond had been made by the damming of part of the trout stream at the point where it entered the Maudeley estate, and the diversion of the rest to a new channel. The narrow strip of land between the pond and the new channel made a little waterlocked kingdom of its own for the cottage, which had been originally a fishing hut, built in an Izaak Walton-ish mood by one of the owners of Maudeley. But the public footpath through the park ran along the farther side of the pond, and the doings of the inhabitants of the cottage, thick though the leafage was, could sometimes be observed from it.

Involuntarily Meynell's footsteps lingered as the little thatched house became visible, its windows set wide to the sounds and scents of the September day. There was conveyed to him a sense of its warm loneliness in the summer nights, of the stars glimmering upon it through the trees, of the owls crying round it. And within—in one of those upper rooms—those soft deep eyes, at rest in sleep?—or looking out, perhaps, into the breathing glooms of the wood?—the sweet face propped on the slender hand.

He felt certain that the inner life of such a personality as Mary Elsmere was rich and passionate. Sometimes, in these lonely hours, did she think of the man who had told her so much of himself on that, to him, memorable walk? Meynell looked back upon the intimate and autobiographical talk into which he had been led, with some wonder and a hot cheek. He had confessed himself partly to Elsmere's daughter, on a hint of sympathy, as to one entitled to such a confidence, so to speak, by inheritance, should she desire it; but still more—he owned it—to a delightful woman. It was the first time in Meynell's strenuous life, filled to the brim with intellectual and speculative effort on the one hand, and with the care of his parish on the other, that he had been conscious of any such feeling as now possessed him. In his first manhood it had been impossible for him to marry, because he had his brothers to educate. And when they were safely out in the world the Rector, absorbed in the curing of sick bodies and the saving of sick souls, could not dream of spending the money thus set free on a household for himself.

He had had his temptations of the flesh, his gusts of inclination, like other men. But he had fought them down victoriously, for conscience sake; and it was long now since anything of the sort had assailed him.

He paused a moment among the trees, just before the cottage passed out of sight. The sun was sinking in a golden haze, the first prophecy of autumnal mists. Broad lights lay here and there upon the water, to be lost again in depths of shadow, wherein woods of dream gave back the woods that stooped to them from the shore. Everything was so still he could hear the fish rising, the run of a squirrel along a branch, the passage of a coot through the water.

The very profoundity of nature's peace suddenly showed him to himself. A man engaged in a struggle beyond his power!—committed to one of those tasks that rend and fever the human spirit even while they ennoble it! He had talked boldly to Stephen and the Bishop of "war"—"inevitable" and "necessary war." At the same time there was no one who would suffer from war more than he. The mere daily practice of Christianity, as a man's life-work, is a daily training in sensitiveness, involves a daily refining of the nerves. When a man so trained, so refined, takes up the public tasks of leadership and organization, in this noisy, hard-hitting world, his nature is set at enmity with itself. Meynell did not yet know whether the mystic in him would allow the fighter in him to play his part.

If the memory of Fenton's cold, unrecognizing eyes and rigid mouth, as they passed each other in the silence of the Cathedral, had power to cause so deep a stab of pain, how was he to brace himself in the future to what must come?—the alienation of friend after friend, the condemnation of the good, the tumult, the poisoned feeling, the abuse, public and private.

Only by the help of that Power behind the veil of things, perceived by the mind of faith! "Thou, Thou art being and breath!—Thine is this truth, which, like a living hand, bridles and commands me. Grind my life as corn in Thy mill!—but forsake me not! Nay, Thou wilt not, Thou canst not forsake me!"

No hope for a man attempting such an enterprise as Meynell's but in this simplicity, this passion of self-surrender. Without it no adventure in the spiritual fight has ever touched and fired the heart of man. Meynell was sternly and simply aware of it.

But how is this temper, this passion, kindled?

The answer flashed. Everywhere the divine ultimate Power mediates itself through the earthly elements and forces, speaks through small, childish things, incarnates itself in lover, wife, or friend—flashing its mystic fire through the web of human relations. It seemed to Meynell, as he stood in the evening stillness by the pond, hidden from sight by the light brushwood round him, that, absorbed as he had been from his youth in the symbolism and passion of the religious life, as other men are absorbed in art or science, he had never really understood one of these great words by which he imagined himself to live—Love, or Endurance, or Sacrifice, or Joy—because he had never known the most sacred, the most intimate, things of human life out of which they grow.

And there uprose in him a sudden yearning—a sudden flame of desire—for the revealing love of wife and child. As it thrilled through him, he seemed to be looking down into the eyes—so frank, so human—of Mary Elsmere.

Then while he watched, lost in feeling, yet instinctively listening for any movement in the wood, there was a flicker of white among the trees opposite. A girl, book in hand, came down to the water's edge, and paused there a little, watching the glow of sunset on the water. Meynell retreated farther into the wood; but he was still able to see her. Presently she sat down, propping herself against a tree, and began to read.

Her presence, the grace of her bending neck, informed the silence of the woods with life and charm. Meynell watched her a few moments in a trance of pleasure. But memory broke in upon the trance and scattered all his pleasure. What reasonable hope of winning the daughter of that quiet, indomitable woman, who, at their first meeting, had shown him with such icy gentleness the gulf between himself and them?

And yet between himself and Mary he knew that there was no gulf.
Spiritually she was her father's child, and not her mother's.

But to suppose that she would consent to bring back into her mother's life the same tragic conflict, in new form, which had already rent and seared it, was madness. He read his dismissal in her quiet avoidance of him ever since she had been a witness of her mother's manner toward him.

No. Such a daughter would never inflict a second sorrow, of the same kind, on such a mother. Meynell bowed his head, and went slowly away. It was as though he left youth and all delightfulness behind him, in the deepening dusk of the woods.

* * * * *

While Meynell was passing through the woods of Forkéd Pond a very different scene, vitally connected with the Rector and his fortunes, was passing a mile away, in a workman's cottage at Upcote Minor.

Barron had spent an agitated day. After his interview with the Bishop, in which he was rather angrily conscious that his devotion and his zeal were not rewarded with as much gratitude or as complete a confidence on the Bishop's part as he might have claimed, he called on Canon France.

To him he talked long and emphatically on the situation, on the excessive caution of the Bishop, who had entirely refused to inhibit any one of the eighteen, at present, lest there should be popular commotions; on the measures that he and his friends were taking, and on the strong feeling that he believed to be rising against the Modernists. It was evident that he was discontented with the Bishop, and believed himself the only saviour of the situation.

Canon France watched him, sunk deep in his armchair, the plump fingers of one hand playing with certain charter rolls of the fourteenth century, with their seals attached, which lay in a tray beside him. He had just brought them over from the Cathedral Library, and was longing to be at work on them. Barron's conversation did not interest him in the least, and he even grudged him his second cup of tea. But he did not show his impatience. He prophesied a speedy end to a ridiculous movement; wondered what on earth would happen to some of the men, who had nothing but their livings, and finally said, with a humorous eye, and no malicious intention:

"The Romanists have always an easy way of settling these things. They find a scandal or invent one. But Meynell, I suppose, is immaculate."

Barron shook his head.

"Meynell's life is absolutely correct, outwardly," he said slowly. "Of course the Upcote people whom he has led away think him a saint."

"Ah, well," said the Canon, smiling, "no hope then—that way. I rejoice, of course, for Meynell's sake. But the goodness of the unbeliever is becoming a great puzzle to mankind."

"Apparent goodness," said Barron hotly.

The Canon smiled again. He wished—and this time more intensely—that
Barron would go, and let him get to his charters.

And in a few minutes Barron did take his departure. As he walked to the inn to find his carriage he pondered the problem of the virtuous unbeliever. A certain Bampton lecture by a well-known and learned Bishop recurred to him, which most frankly and drastically connected "Unbelief" with "Sin." Yet somehow the view was not borne out, as in the interests of a sound theology it should have been, by experience.

After all, he reached Upcote in good time before dinner, and remembering that he had to inflict a well-deserved lecture on the children who had been caught injuring trees and stealing wood in his plantations, he dismissed the carriage and made his way, before going home, to the cottage, which stood just outside the village, on the way from Maudeley to the Rectory and the church.

He knocked peremptorily. But no one came. He knocked again, chafing at the delay. But still no one came, and after going round the cottage, tapping at one of the windows, and getting no response, he was just going away, in the belief that the cottage was empty, when there was a rattling sound at the front door. It opened, and an old woman stood in the doorway.

"You've made a pretty noise," she said grimly, "but there's no one in but me."

"I am Mr. Barron," said her visitor, sharply. "And I want to see John Broad. My keepers have been complaining to me about his children's behaviour in the woods."

The woman before him shook her head irritably.

"What's the good of asking me? I only came off the cars here last night."

"You're a lodger, I suppose?" said Barron, eyeing her suspiciously. He did not allow his tenants to take in lodgers.

And the more he examined her the stranger did her aspect seem. She was evidently a woman of seventy or upward, and it struck him that she looked haggard and ill. Her grayish-white hair hung untidily about a thin, bony face; the eyes, hollow and wavering, infected the spectator with their own distress; yet the distress was so angry that it rather repelled than appealed. Her dress was quite out of keeping with the labourer's cottage in which she stood. It was a shabby blue silk, fashionably cut, and set off by numerous lockets and bangles.

She smiled scornfully at Barron's questions.

"A lodger? Well, I daresay I am. I'm John's mother."

"His mother?" said Barron, astonished. "I didn't know he had a mother alive." But as he spoke some vague recollection of Theresa's talk in the morning came back upon him.

The strange person in the doorway looked at him oddly.

"Well, I daresay you didn't. There's a many as would say the same. I've been away this eighteen year, come October."

Barron, as she spoke, was struck with her accent, and recalled her mention of "the cars."

"Why, you've been in the States," he said.

"That's it—eighteen year." Then suddenly, pressing her hand to her forehead, she said angrily: "I don't know what you mean. What do you come bothering me for? I don't know who you are—and I don't know nothing about your trees. Come in and sit down. John'll be in directly."

She held the door open, and Barron, impelled by a sudden curiosity, stepped in. He thought the woman was half-witted; but her silk dress, and her jewellery, above all her sudden appearance on the scene as the mother of a man whom he had always supposed to be alone in the world, with three motherless, neglected children, puzzled him.

So as one accustomed to keep a sharp eye on the morals and affairs of his cottage tenants, he began to question her about herself. She had thrown herself confusedly on a chair, and sat with her head thrown back, and her eyes half closed—as though in pain. The replies he got from her were short and grudging, but he made out from them that she had married a second time in the States, that she had only recently written to her son, who for some years had supposed her dead, and had now come home to him, having no other relation left in the World.

He soon convinced himself that she was not normally sane. That she had no idea as to his own identity was not surprising, for she had left Upcote for the States years before his succession to the White House estate. But her memory in all directions was confused, and her strange talk made him suspect drugs. She had also, it seemed, the usual grievances of the unsound mind, and believed herself to be injured and assailed by persons to whom she darkly alluded.

As they sat talking, footsteps were heard in the road outside. Mrs. Sabin—so she gave her name—at once hurried to the door and looked out. The movement betrayed her excited, restless state—the state of one just returned to a scene once familiar and trying, with a clouded brain, to recover old threads and clues.

Barron heard a low cry from her, and looked round.

"What's the matter?"

He saw her bent forward and pointing, her wrinkled face expressing a wild astonishment.

"That's her!—that's my Miss Alice!"

Barron, following her gesture, perceived through the half-open door two figures standing in the road on the farther side of a bit of village green. Meynell, who had just emerged from Maudeley Park upon the highroad, had met Alice Puttenham on her way to pay an evening visit to the Elsmeres, and had stopped to ask a question about some village affairs. Miss Puttenham's face was turned toward John Broad's cottage; the Rector had his back to it. They were absorbed in what they were talking about, and had of course no idea that they were watched.

"Why do you say my Miss Alice?" Barron inquired in astonishment.

Mrs. Sabin gave a low laugh. And at the moment, Meynell turned so that the level light now flooding the village street shone full upon him. Mrs. Sabin tottered back from the door, with another stifled cry, and sank into her chair. Her eyes seemed to be starting out of her head. "But—but they told me he was dead. He'll have married her then?"

She raised herself, peering eagerly at her companion.

"Married whom?" said Barron, utterly mystified, but affected himself, involuntarily, by the excitement of his strange companion.

"Why—Miss Alice!" she said gasping.

"Why should he marry her?"

Mrs. Sabin tried to control herself. "I'm not to talk about that—I know I'm not. But they give me my money for fifteen year—and then they stopped giving it—three year ago. I suppose they thought I'd never be back here again. But John's my flesh and blood, all the same. I made Mr. Sabin write for me to Sir Ralph. But there came a lawyer's letter and fifty pounds—and that was to be the last, they said. So when Mr. Sabin died, I said I'd come over and see for myself. But I'm ill—you see—and John's a fool—and I must find some one as 'ull tell me what to do. If you're a gentleman living here"—she peered into his face—"perhaps you'll tell me? Lady Fox-Wilton's left comfortable, I know. Why shouldn't she do what's handsome? Perhaps you'll give me a word of advice, sir? But you mustn't tell!—not a word to anybody. Perhaps they'll be for putting me in prison?"

She put her finger to her mouth; and then once more she bent forward, passionately scrutinizing the two people in the distance. Barron had grown white.

"If you want my advice you must try and tell me plainly what all this means," he said, sternly.

She looked at him—with a mad expression flickering between doubt and desire.

"Then you must shut the door, sir," she said at last. Yet as he moved to do so, she bent forward once more to look intently at the couple outside.

"And what did they tell me that lie for?" she repeated, in a tone half perplexed, half resentful. Then she turned peremptorily to Barron.

"Shut the door!"

* * * * *

Half an hour later Barron emerged into the road, from the cottage. He walked like a man bewildered. All that was evil in him rejoiced; all that was good sorrowed. He felt that God had arisen, and scattered his enemies; he also felt a genuine horror and awe in the presence of human frailty.

All night long he lay awake, pondering how to deal with the story which had been told him; how to clear up its confusions and implications; to find some firm foothold in the mad medley of the woman's talk—some reasonable scheme of time and place. Much of what she had told him had been frankly incoherent; and to press her had only made confusion worse. He was tolerably certain that she was suffering from some obscure brain trouble. The effort of talking to him had clearly exhausted her; but he had not been able to refrain from making her talk. At the end of the half hour he had advised her—in some alarm at her ghastly look—to see a doctor. But the suggestion had made her angry, and he had let it drop.

In the morning news was brought to him from Broad's cottage that John Broad's mother, Mrs. Richard Sabin, who had arrived from America only forty-eight hours before, had died suddenly in the night. The bursting of an unsuspected aneurism in the brain was, according to the doctor called in, the cause of death.

BOOK II

HESTER

"Light as the flying seed-balls is their play
The silly maids!"

"Who see in mould the rose unfold,
The soul through blood and tears."

CHAPTER VII

"I cannot get this skirt to hang as Lady Edith's did," said Sarah
Fox-Wilton discontentedly.

"Spend twenty guineas on it, my dear, as Lady Edith did on hers, and it'll be all right," said a mocking voice.

Sarah frowned. She went on pinning and adjusting a serge skirt in the making, which hung on the dummy before her. "Oh, we all know what you would like to spend on your dress, Hester!" she said angrily, but indistinctly, as her mouth was full of pins.

"Because really nice frocks are not to be had any other way," said Hester coolly. "You pay for them—and you get them. But as for supposing you can copy Lady Edith's frocks for nothing, why, of course you can't, and you don't!"

"If I had ever so much money," said Sarah severely, "I shouldn't think it right to spend what Lady Edith does on her dress."

"Oh, wouldn't you!" said Hester with a laugh and a yawn. "Just give me the chance—that's all!" Then she turned her head—"Lulu!—you mustn't eat any more toffy!"—and she flung out a mischievous hand and captured a box that was lying on the table, before a girl, who was sitting near it with a book, could abstract from it another square of toffy.

"Give it me!" said Lulu, springing up, and making for her assailant.
Hester laughingly resisted, and they wrestled for the box a little, till
Hester suddenly let it go.

"Take it then—and good luck to you! I wouldn't spoil my teeth and my complexion as you do—not for tons of sweets. Hullo!"—the speaker sprang up—"the rain's over, and it's quite a decent evening. I shall go out for a run and take Roddy."

"Then I shall have to come too," said Sarah, getting up from her knees, and pulling down her sleeves. "I don't want to at all, but mamma says you are not to go out alone."

Hester flushed. "Do you think I can't escape you all—if I want to? Of course I can. What geese you are! None of you will ever prevent me from doing what I want to do. It really would save such a lot of time and trouble if you would get that into your heads."

"Where do you mean to go?" said Sarah stolidly, without taking any notice of her remark. "Because if you'll go to the village, I can get some binding I want."

"I have no intention whatever of going out for your convenience, thank you!" said Hester, laughing angrily. "I am going into the garden, and you can come or not as you please." She opened the French window as she spoke and stepped out.

"Has mamma heard from that Paris woman yet?" asked Lulu, looking after Hester, who was now standing on the lawn playing with a terrier-puppy she had lately brought home as a gift from a neighbouring farmer—much to Lady Fox-Wilton's annoyance. Hester had an absurd way of making friends with the most unsuitable people, and they generally gave her things.

"The Rector expected to hear to-day."

"I don't believe she'll go," said Lulu, beginning again on the toffy. She was a heavily made girl of twenty, with sleepy eyes and a dull complexion. She took little exercise, was inordinately fond of sweet things, helped her mother a little in the housekeeping, and was intimately acquainted with all the gossip of the village. So was Sarah; but her tongue was sharper than Lulu's, and her brain quicker. She was therefore the unpopular sister; while for Lulu her acquaintances felt rather a contemptuous indulgence. Sarah had had various love affairs, which had come to nothing, and was regarded as "disappointed" in the village. Lulu was not interested in young men, and had never yet been observed to take any trouble to capture one. So long as she was allowed sufficient sixpenny novels to read, and enough sweet things to eat, she was good-humoured enough, and could do kind things on occasion for her friends. Sarah was rarely known to do kind things; but as her woman friends were much more afraid of her than of Lulu, she was in general treated with much more consideration.

Still it could not be said that Lady Fox-Wilton was to be regarded as blessed in either of her two elder daughters. And her sons were quite frankly a trouble to her. The eldest, Sarah's junior by a year and a half, had just left Oxford suddenly and ignominiously, without a degree, and was for the most part loafing at home. The youngest, a boy of fifteen, was supposed to be delicate, and had been removed from school by his mother on that account. He too was at home, and a tutor who lodged in the village was understood to be preparing him for the Civil Service. He was a pettish and spiteful lad, and between him and Hester existed perpetual feud.

But indeed Hester was at war with each member of the family in turn; sometimes with all of them together. And it had been so from her earliest childhood. They all felt instinctively that she despised them and the slow, lethargic temperament which was in most of them an inheritance from a father cast in one of the typical moulds of British Philistinism. There was some insurmountable difference between her and them. In the first place, her beauty set her apart from the rest; and, beside her, Sarah's sharp profile, and round apple-red cheeks, or Lulu's clumsiness, made, as both girls were secretly aware, an even worse impression than they need have made. And in the next, there were in her strains of romantic, egotistic ability to which nothing in them corresponded. She could play, she could draw—brilliantly, spontaneously—up to a certain point, when neither Sarah nor Lulu could stumble through a "piece," or produce anything capable of giving the smallest satisfaction to their drawing-master. She could chatter, on occasion, so that a room full of people instinctively listened. And she had read voraciously, especially poetry, where they were content with picture-papers and the mildest of novels. Hester brought nothing to perfection; but there could be no question that in every aspect of life she was constantly making, in comparison with her family, a dashing or dazzling effect all the more striking because of the unattractive milieu out of which it sprang.

The presence of Lady Fox-Wilton, in particular, was needed to show these contrasts at their sharpest.

As Hester still raced about the lawn, with the dog, that lady came round the corner of the house, with a shawl over her head, and beckoned to the girl at play. Hester carelessly looked round.

"What do you want, mamma!"

"Come here. I want to speak to you."

Hester ran across the lawn in wide curves, playing with the dog, and arrived laughing and breathless beside the newcomer. Edith Fox-Wilton was a small, withered woman, in a widow's cap, who more than looked her age, which was not far from fifty. She had been pretty in youth, and her blue eyes were still appealing, especially when she smiled. But she did not smile often, and she had the expression of one perpetually protesting against all the agencies—this-worldly or other-worldly—which had the control of her existence. Her weak fretfulness depressed all the vitalities near her; only Hester resisted.

At the moment, however, her look was not so much fretful as excited. Her thin cheeks were much redder than usual; she constantly looked round as though expecting or dreading some interruption; and in a hand which shook she held a just opened letter.

"What is the matter, mamma?" asked Hester, a sharp challenging note in her gay voice. "You look as though something had happened."

"Nothing has happened," said Lady Fox-Wilton hastily. "And I wish you wouldn't romp with the puppy in that way, Hester. He's always doing some damage to the flowers. I'm going out, and I wished to give you a message from the Rector."

"Is that from Uncle Richard?" said Hester, glancing carelessly at the letter.

Lady Fox-Wilton crushed it in her hand.

"I told you it was. Why do you ask unnecessary questions? The Rector has heard from the lady in Paris and he wants you to go as soon as possible. Either he or Aunt Alice will take you over. We have had the best possible recommendations. You will enjoy it very much. They can get you the best lessons in Paris, they say. They know everybody."

"H'm—" said Hester, reflectively. Then she looked at the speaker. "Do you know, mamma, that I happen to be eighteen this week?"

"Don't be silly, Hester! Of course I know!"

"Well, you see, it's rather important. Am I or am I not obliged to do what you and Mr. Meynell want me to do? I believe I'm not obliged. Anyway, I don't quite see how you're going to make me do it, if I don't want to."

"You can behave like a naughty, troublesome girl, without any proper feeling, of course!—if you choose," said Lady Fox-Wilton warmly. "But I trust you will do nothing of the kind. We are your guardians till you are twenty-one; and you ought to be guided by us."

"Well, of course I can't be engaged to Stephen, if you say I mayn't—because there's Stephen to back you up. But if Queen Victoria could be a queen at eighteen, I don't see why I shouldn't be fit at eighteen to manage my own wretched affairs! Anyway—I—am—not—going to Paris—unless I want to go. So I don't advise you to promise that lady just yet. If she keeps her room empty, you might have to pay for it!"

"Hester, you are really the plague of my life!" cried Lady Fox-Wilton helplessly. "I try to keep you—the Rector tries to keep you—out of mischief that any girl ought to be ashamed—of—and—"

"What mischief?" demanded Hester peremptorily. "Don't run into generalities, mamma."

"You know very well what mischief I mean!"

"I know that you think I shall be running away some day with Sir Philip Meryon!" said the girl, laughing, but with a fierce gleam in her eyes. "I have no intention at present of doing anything of the kind. But if anything could make me do it, it would be the foolish way in which you and the others behave. I don't believe the Rector ever told you to set Sarah and Lulu on to dog me wherever I go!"

"He told me you were not to be allowed to meet that man. You won't promise me not to meet him—and what can we do? You know what the Rector feels. You know that he spent an hour yesterday arguing and pleading with you, when he had been up most of the night preparing papers for this commission. What's the matter with you, Hester? Are you quite in your right senses?"

The girl had clasped her hands behind her back, and stood with one foot forward, "on tiptoe for a flight," her young figure and radiant look expressing the hot will which possessed her. At the mention of Meynell's name she clearly hesitated, a frown crossed her eyes, her lip twitched. Then she said with vehemence:

"Who asked him to spend all that time? Not I. Let him leave me alone. He does not care twopence about me, and it's mere humbug and hypocrisy all his pretending to care."

"And your Aunt Alice—who's always worshipped you? Why, she's just miserable about you!"

"She says exactly what you and Uncle Richard tell her to say—she always has! Well, I don't know about Paris, mamma—I'll think about it. If you and Sarah will just let me be, I'll take Roddy for a stroll, and then after tea I'll tell you what I'll do." And, turning, she beckoned to a fine collie lazily sunning himself on the drawing-room steps, and he sprang up, gambolling about her.

"Promise you won't meet that man!" said Lady Fox-Wilton, in agitation.

"I believe he went up to Scotland to-day," said Hester, laughing. "I haven't the smallest intention of meeting him. Come, Roddy!"

The eyes of the two met—in those of the older woman, impatience, a kind of cold exasperation; in Hester's, defiance. It was a strange look to pass between a mother and daughter. Hester turned away, and then paused:

"Oh, by the way, mamma—where are you going?"

Lady Fox-Wilton hesitated unaccountedly.

"Why do you ask?"

Hester opened her eyes.

"Why shouldn't I? Is it a secret? I wanted you to tell Aunt Alice something if you were going that way."

"Mamma!"

Sarah suddenly emerged from the schoolroom window and ran excitedly across the lawn toward her mother. "Have you heard this extraordinary story about John Broad's mother? Tibbald has just told me."

Tibbald was the butler, and Sarah's special friend and crony.

"What story? I wish you wouldn't allow Tibbald to gossip as you do, Sarah!" said Lady Fox-Wilton angrily. But a close observer might have seen that her bright colour precipitately left her.

"Why, what harm was it?" cried Sarah, wondering. "He told me, because it seems Mrs. Sabin used to be a servant of ours long ago. Do you remember her, mamma?"

Again Lady Fox-Wilton stumbled perceptibly in replying. She turned away, and, with the garden scissors at her waist, she began vaguely to clip off some dead roses from some bushes near her.

"We once had a maid—for a very short time," she said over her shoulder, "who married some one of that name. What about her?"

"Well, she came back from America two days ago. John Broad thought she was dead. He hadn't heard of her for four years. But she turned up on Tuesday—the queerest old woman! She sat there boasting and chattering—in a silk dress with gold bracelets!—they thought she was going to make all their fortunes. But she must just have been off her head, for she died last night in her sleep, and there were only a few shillings on her—not enough to bury her. There's to be an inquest this evening, they say."

"Don't spend all your time chattering in the village, Sarah," said Lady Fox-Wilton severely, as, still with her back toward the girls, she moved away in the direction of the drive. "You'll never get your dress done if you do."

"I say—what's wrong with mamma?" said Hester coolly, looking after her.
"I suppose Bertie's been getting into some fresh bother."

Bertie was the elder brother, who was Sarah's special friend in the family. So that she at once resented the remark.

"If she's worrying about anything, she's worrying about you," said Sarah tartly, as she went back to the house. "We all know that."

Hester, with her dog beside her, went strolling leisurely through the village street, past Miss Puttenham's cottage on the one hand and the Rectory gates on the other, making for a footpath that led from the back of the village, through fields and woods, on to the Chase.

As she passed beneath the limes that overhung Miss Puttenham's railings she perceived some distant figures in the garden. Uncle Richard, with mamma and Aunt Alice on either side of him. They were walking up and down in close conversation; or, rather, Uncle Richard seemed to be talking earnestly, addressing now one lady, now the other.

What a confabulation! No doubt all about her own crimes and misdemeanours. What fun to creep into the garden and play the spy. "That's what Sarah would do—but I'm not Sarah." Instead, she turned into the footpath and began to mount toward the borders of the Chase. It was a brilliant September afternoon, and the new grass in the shorn hayfields was vividly green. In front rose the purple hills of the Chase, while to the left, on the far borders of the village, the wheels and chimneys of two collieries stood black against a blaze of sun. But the sharp emphasis of light and colour, which in general would have set her own spirits racing, was for a while lost on Hester. As soon as she was out of sight of the village, or any passers-by, her aspect changed. Once or twice she caught her breath in what was very like a sob; and there were moments when she could only save herself from the disgrace of tears by a wild burst of racing with Roddy. It was evident that her brush with Lady Fox-Wilton had not left her as callous as she seemed.

Presently the path forsook the open fields and entered a plantation of dark and closely woven trees where the track was almost lost in the magnificence of the bracken. Beyond this, a short climb of broken slopes, and Hester was out on the bare heath, with the moorland wind blowing about her.

She sat down on a bank beneath a birch tree, twisted and tortured out of shape by the northwesterly gales that swept the heath in winter. All round her a pink and purple wilderness, with oases of vivid green and swaying grass. Nothing in sight but a keeper's hut, and some grouse butts far away; an ugly red building on the horizon, in the very middle of the heath, the Markborough isolation hospital; and round the edge of the vast undulating plateau in all directions the faint smoke of the colliery chimneys. But the colour of the heath was the marvel. The world seemed stained in crimson, and in every shade and combination of it. Close at hand the reds and pinks were diapered with green and gold as the bilberries and the grasses ran in and out of the heather; but on every side the crimson spread and billowed to the horizon, covering the hollows and hills of the Chase, absorbing all lesser tones into itself. After the rain of the morning, the contours of the heath, the distances of the plain, were unnaturally clear; and as the sunshine, the high air, the freshly moving wind, played upon Hester, her irritation passed away in a sensuous delight.

"Why should I let them worry me? I won't! I am here! I am alive! I am only eighteen! I am going to manage my life for myself—and get out of this coil. Now let me think!"

She slid downward among the heather, her face propped on her hands. Close beneath her eyes was an exquisite tuft of pink bell-heather intergrown with bunchberries. And while a whole vague series of thoughts and memories passed through her mind she was still vividly conscious of the pink bells, the small bright leaves. Sensation in her was exceptionally keen, whether for pleasure or pain. She knew it and had often coolly asked herself whether it meant that she would wear out—life and brain—quicker than other people—burn faster to the socket. So much the better if it did.

What was it she really wanted?—what did she mean to do? Proudly, she refused to admit any other will in the matter. The thought of Meynell, indeed, touched some very sore and bitter chords in her mind, but it did not melt her. She knew very well that she had nothing to blame her guardian for; that year after year from her childhood up she had repelled and resisted him, that her whole relation to him had been one of stubbornness and caprice. Well, there were reasons for it; she was not going to repent or change.

Of late his conduct with regard to Stephen's proposal had stirred in her a kind of rage. It was not that she imagined herself in love with Stephen; but she had chosen to be engaged to him; and that any one should affect to control her in such a matter, should definitely and decidedly cross her will, was intolerable to her wild pride. If Stephen had rebelled with her, she might have fallen fiercely in love with him—for a month. But he had submitted—though it was tolerably plain what it had cost him; and all her careless liking for him, the fruit of years of very poorly requited devotion on his part, seemed to have disappeared in a night.

Why shouldn't she be engaged at seventeen—within two months of eighteen, in fact? Heaps of girls were. It was mere tyranny and nonsense. She recalled her interview with Meynell, in which the Rector had roused in her a new and deeper antagonism than any she had yet felt toward his efforts to control her. It was as though he did not altogether believe in his own arguments; as though there were something behind which she could not get at. But if there were something behind, she had a right to know it. She had a right to know the meaning of her father's extraordinary letter to Meynell—the letter attached to his will—in which she had been singled out by name as needing the special tutelage of the Rector. So far as the Rector's guardianship of the other children was concerned, it was almost a nominal thing. Another guardian had been named in the will, Lady Fox-Wilton's elder brother, and practically everything that concerned the other children was settled by him, in concert with the mother. The Rector never interfered, was never indeed consulted, except on purely formal matters of business. But for her—for her only—Uncle Richard—as she always called her guardian—was to be the master—the tyrant!—close at hand. For so Sir Ralph had laid it down, in his testamentary letter—"I commend Hester to your special care. And in any difficulties that may arise in connection with her, I beg for our old friendship's sake that you will give my wife the help and counsel that she will certainly need. She knows it is my wish she should rely entirely upon you."

Why had he written such a letter? Since Sir Ralph's death, two years before, the story of it had got about; and the injustice, as she held, of her position under it had sunk deep into the girl's passionate sense, and made her infinitely more difficult to manage than she had been before. Of course everybody said it was because of her temper; because of the constant friction between her and her father; people believed the hateful things he used sometimes to say about her.

Nor was it only the guardianship—there was the money too! Provision made for all of them by name—and nothing for her! She had made Sarah show her a copy of the will—she knew! Nothing indeed for any of them—the girls at least—till Lady Fox-Wilton's death, or till they married; but nothing for her, under any circumstances.

"Well, why should there be?" Sarah had said. "You know you'll have Aunt
Alice's money. She won't leave a penny to us."

All very well! The money didn't matter! But to be singled out and held up to scorn by your own father!

A flood of bitterness surged in the girl's heart. And then they expected her to be a meek and obedient drudge to her mother and her elder sisters; to open her mouth and take what they chose to send her. She might not be engaged to Stephen—for two years at any rate; and yet if she amused herself with any one else she was to be packed off to Paris, to some house of detention or other, under lock and key.

Her cheeks flamed. When had she first come across Philip Meryon? Only the day before that evening when Uncle Richard had found her fishing with him. She knew very well that he was badly spoken of; trust Upcote for gossip and scandal! Well, so was she!—they were outcasts together. Anyway, he was more amusing to walk and talk with than her sisters, or the dreadful young men they sometimes gathered about them. Why shouldn't she walk and talk with him? As if she couldn't protect herself! As if she didn't know a great deal more of the world than her stupid sisters did, who never read a book or thought of anything beyond the tittle-tattle of their few local friends.

But Philip Meryon had read lots of books, and liked those that she liked. He could read French too, as she could. And he had lent her some French books, which she had read eagerly—at night or in the woods—wherever she could be alone and unobserved. Why shouldn't she read them? There was one among them—"Julie de Trecoeur," by Octave Feuillet, that still seemed running, like a great emotion, through her veins. The tragic leap of Julie, as she sets her horse to the cliff and thunders to her death, was always in Hester's mind. It was so that she herself would like to die, spurning submission and patience, and all the humdrum virtues.

She raised herself, and the dog beside her sprang up and barked. The sun was just dropping below a bank of fiery cloud, and a dazzling and garish light lay on the red undulations of the heath. As she stood up she suddenly perceived the figure of a man about a hundred yards off emerging from a gully—a sportsman with his gun over his shoulder. He had apparently just parted from the group with whom he had been shooting, who were disappearing in another direction.

Philip Meryon! Now she remembered! He and two other men had taken the shooting on this side of the Chase. Honestly she had forgotten it; honestly her impression was that he had gone to Scotland. But of course none of her family would ever believe it. They would insist she had simply come out to meet him.

What was she to do? She was in a white serge dress, and with Roddy beside her, on that bare heath, she was an object easily recognized. Indeed, as she hesitated, she heard a call in the distance, and saw that Meryon was waving to her and quickening his pace. Instantly, with a leaping pulse, she turned and fled, Roddy beside her, barking his loudest. She ran along the rough track of the heath, as though some vague wild terror had been breathed into her by the local Pan. She ran fleet and light as air—famous as a runner from her childhood. But the man behind her had once been a fine athlete, and he gained upon her fast. Soon she could hear his laugh behind her, his entreaties to her to stop. She had reached the edge of the heath, where the wood began, and the path ran winding down it, with banks of thick fern on either hand.

If it had not been for the dog she could have slipped under the close-set trees, whence the light had already departed, and lain close among the fern. But with Roddy—no chance! She suddenly turned toward her pursuer, and with her hand on the dog's neck awaited him.

"Caught—caught!—by Jove!" cried Philip Meryon, plunging to her through the fern. "Now what do you deserve—for running away?"

"A gentleman would not have tried to catch me!" she said haughtily, as she faced him, with dilating nostrils.

"Take care!—don't be rude to me—I shall take my revenge!"

As he spoke, Meryon was fairly dazzled, intoxicated by the beauty of the vision before him—this angry wood-nymph, half-vanishing like another Daphne into the deep fern amid which she stood. But at the same time he was puzzled—and checked—by her expression. There was no mere provocation in it, no defiance that covers a yielding mind; but, rather, an energy of will, a concentrated force, that held at bay a man whose will was the mere register of his impulses.

"You forget," said Hester coolly, "that I have Roddy with me." And as she spoke the dog couching at her side poked up his slender nose through the fern and growled. He did not like Sir Philip.

Meryon looked upon her smiling—his hands on his sides. "Do you mean to say that when you ran you did not mean me to follow?"

"On the contrary, if I ran, it was evidently because I wished to get away."

"Then you were very ungrateful and unkind; for I have at this moment in my pocket a book you asked me to get for you. That's what I get for trying to please you."

"I don't remember that I asked you to get anything for me."

"Well, you said you would like to see some of George Sand's novels, which—for me—was just the same. So when I went to London yesterday I managed to borrow it, and there it is." He pointed triumphantly to a yellow-paper-bound volume sticking out of his coat pocket. "Of course you know George Sand is a sort of old Johnnie now; nobody reads her. But that's your affair. Will you have it?" He offered it.

The excitement, the wild flush in the girl's face, had subsided. She looked at the book, and at the man holding it out.

"What is it?" She stooped to read the title—"Mauprat." "What's it about?"

"Some nonsense about a cad tamed by a sentimental young woman." He shrugged his shoulders, "I tried to read it, and couldn't. But they say it's one of her best. If you want it, there it is."

She took it reluctantly, and moved on along the downward path, he following, and the dog beside them.

"Have you read the other book?" he asked her.

"'Julie de Trécoeur?' Yes."

"What did you think of it?"