The Case of Richard Meynell Part 24

The two gazed into each other's eyes, questions and answers, unspoken yet understood, pa.s.sing between them. Then Catharine disengaged herself, rose, and went away.

During the night that followed Mary slept little. She was engaged in trying to loosen and tear away those tendrils of the heart that had begun to climb and spread more than she knew. Toward the early dawn it seemed to her she heard slight sounds in her mother's room. But immediately afterward she fell asleep.

The next day, Mary could not tell what had happened; but it was as though, in some inexplicable way, doors had been opened and weights lifted; as though fresh winds had been set blowing through the House of Life. Her mother seemed shaken and frail; Mary hovered about her with ministering tenderness. There were words begun and left unfinished, movements and looks that strangely thrilled and bewildered the younger woman. She had no key to them; but they seemed to speak of change--of something in her mother that had been beaten down, and was still faintly, pitifully striving. But she dared say nothing. They read, and wrote letters, and strolled as usual; till in the evening, while Mary was sitting by the water, Catherine came out to her and stood beside her, holding the local paper in her hand.

"I see there is to be a meeting in the village next Friday--of the Reformers' League. Mr. Meynell is to speak."

Mary looked up in amazement.

"Yes?"

"You would perhaps like to go. I will go with you."

"Mother!" Mary caught her mother's hand and kissed it, while the tears sprang to her eyes. "I want to go nowhere--to do nothing--that gives you pain!"

"I know that," said Catharine quietly. "But I--I should like to understand him."

And with a light touch of her hand on Mary's red-gold hair, she went back into the house. Mary wandered away by herself into the depths of the woods, weeping, she scarcely knew why. But some sure instinct, lost in wonder as she was, bade her ask her mother no questions; to let time show.

The day of the League meeting came. It happened also to be the date on which the Commission of Inquiry into the alleged heresies and irregularities of the Rector of Upcote was holding its final meeting at Markborough.

The meetings of the commission were held in the Library of the Cathedral, once a collegiate church of the Cistercian order. All trace of the great monastery formerly connected with it had disappeared, except for the Library and a vaulted room below it which now made a pa.s.sageway from the Deanery to the north transept.

The Library offered a worthy setting for high themes. The walls were, of course, wreathed in the pale golds and dignified browns of old books. A light gallery ran round three sides of the room, while a large perpendicular window at the farther end contained the armorial bearings of various benefactors of the see. Beneath the window was a bookcase containing several chained books--a Vulgate, a Saint Augustine, the _Summa_ of St. Thomas; precious possessions, and famous in the annals of early printing. And wherever there was a s.p.a.ce of wall left free, pictures or engravings of former bishops and dignitaries connected with the Cathedral enforced the message and meaning of the room.

A seemly, even beautiful place--pleasantly scented with old leather, and filled on this September afternoon with the suns.h.i.+ne which, on the Chase, was at the same moment kindling the heather into a blood-red magnificence. Here the light slipped in gently, subdued to the quiet note and standard of the old Library.

The Dean was in the Chair. He was a man of seventy who had only just become an old man, submitting with difficulty, even with resentment, to the weight of his years. He wore a green shade over his eyes, beneath which his long sharp nose and pointed chin--in the practical absence of the eyes--showed with peculiar emphasis. He was of heavy build, and suffered from chronic hoa.r.s.eness. In his youth he had been a Broad churchman and a Liberal, and had then pa.s.sed, through stages mysterious to his oldest friends, into an actively dogmatic and ecclesiastical phase. It was rumoured that he had had strange spiritual experiences; a "vision" was whispered; but all that was really known was that from an "advanced" man, in the Liberal sense, he had become the champion of high orthodoxy in the Chapter, and an advocate of disestablishment as the only means of restoring "Catholic liberty" to the Church.

The Dean's enemies, of whom he had not a few, brought various charges against him. It was said that he was a worldling with an undue leaning to notabilities. And indeed in every gathering, social or ecclesiastical, the track of the Dean's conversation sufficiently indicated the relative importance of the persons present. Others declared that during his long tenure of a country living he had left the duties of it mainly to a curate, and had found it more interesting to live in London, conferring with Cabinet Ministers on educational reform; while the women-folk of the Chapter pitied his wife, whose subdued or tremulous aspect certainly suggested that the Dean's critical and sarcastic temper sharpened itself at home for conflicts abroad.

On the Dean's right hand sat Canon Dornal, a man barely forty, who owed his canonry to the herculean work he had done for fourteen years in a South London parish, work that he would never have relinquished for the comparative ease of the Markborough precincts but for a sudden failure in health which had pulled him up in mid-career, and obliged him to think of his wife and children. He had insisted, however, on combining with his canonry a small living in the town, where he could still slave as he pleased; and his sermons in the Cathedral were generally held to be, next to the personality of the Bishop, all that was n.o.blest in Markborough Christianity. His fine head, still instinct with the energy of youth, was covered with strong black hair; dark brows shadowed Cornish blue eyes, simple, tranquil, almost _naif_, until of a sudden there rushed into them the pa.s.sionate or tender feeling that was in truth the heart of the man.

The mouth and chin were rather prominent, and, when at rest, severe. He was a man in whom conscience was a gadfly, remorseless and tormenting. He was himself overstrained and his influence sometimes produced in others a tension on which they looked back with resentment. But he was a saint; open, pure, and loving as a child; yet often tempest-driven with new ideas, since he possessed at once the imagination that frees a man from tradition, and the piety which clings to it.

Beside him sat a University professor, the young holder of an important chair, who had the face, the smile, the curly hair of a boy of twenty, or appeared to have them, till you came to notice the subtleties of the mouth and the crow's-feet which had gathered round the eyes. And the paradox of his aspect only repeated the paradox within. His "History and the Gospels," recently published, would have earned him excommunication under any Pope; yet no one was a more rigid advocate of tests and creeds, or could be more eloquent in defence of d.a.m.natory clauses. The clergy who admired and applauded him did not read his books. It was rumoured indeed that there were many things in them which were unsound; but the rumour only gave additional zest to the speeches in which at Church Congresses and elsewhere he flattered clerical prejudice, and encouraged clerical ignorance. To him there was no more "amusing" study--using "amusing" in the French sense as meaning something that keeps a man intellectually happy and awake--than the study of the Gospels. They presented an endless series of riddles, and riddles were what he liked. But the scientific treatment of these riddles had, according to him, nothing to do with the discipline of the Church; and to the discipline of the Church this young man, with the old eyes and mouth, was rigorously attached. He was a bachelor and a man of means--facts which taken together with his literary reputation and his agreeable aspect made him welcome among women; of which he was well aware.

The Archdeacon, Doctor Froswick, and the Rural Dean, Mr. Brathay, who completed the Commission of Inquiry, were both men of middle age; the Archdeacon, fresh-coloured and fussy, a trivial, kindly person of no great account; the Rural Dean, broad-shouldered and square-faced, a silent, trustworthy man, much beloved in a small circle.

A pile of books, MSS., and letters lay to the Chairman's right hand. On the blotting-pad before him was the voluminous written report of the commission which only awaited the signatures of the Commissioners, and--as to one paragraph in it--a final interview with Meynell himself, which had been fixed for noon. Business was now practically over till he arrived, and conversation had become general.

"You have seen the leader in the _Oracle_ this morning?" asked the Archdeacon, nervously biting his quill. "Perfectly monstrous, I think! I shall withdraw my subscription."

"With the _Oracle_," said the Professor, "it will be a mere question of success or failure. At present they are inclined to back the rebellion."

"And not much wonder!" put in the Dean's hoa.r.s.e voice. "The news this morning is uncommonly bad. Four more men joined the League here--a whole series of League meetings in Yorks.h.i.+re!--half the important newspapers gone over or neutral--and a perfectly scandalous speech from the Bishop of Dunchester!"

"I thought we should hear of Dunchester before long," said the Professor, with a sarcastic lip. "Anything that annoys his brethren has his constant support. But if the Church allows a Socinian to be put over her, she must take the consequences!"

"What can the Church do?" said the Dean, shrugging his shoulders. "If we had accepted Disestablishment years ago, Dunchester would never have been a bishop. And now we may have missed our chance."

"Of what?"--Canon Dornal looked up--"of Disestablishment?"

The Dean nodded.

"The whole force of _this_ Liberal movement," he said slowly, "will be thrown against Disestablishment. There comes the dividing line between it and the past. I say again, we have missed our chance. If the High Churchmen had known their own minds--if they had joined hands boldly with the Liberation society, and struck off the State fetters--we should at least have been left in quiet possession of what remained to us. We should not have been exposed to this treachery from within. Or, at least, we should have made short work of it."

"That means, that you take for granted we should have kept our endowments and our churches?" said Canon Dornal.

The Dean flushed.

"We have been called a nation of shopkeepers," he said vehemently, "but n.o.body has ever called us a nation of thieves."

The Canon was silent. Then his eye caught the bulky MS. report lying before the Dean, and he made a restless movement as though the sight of it displeased him.

"The demonstrations the papers report this morning are not all on one side," said the Rural Dean slowly but cheerfully, as though from a rather unsatisfactory reverie this fact had emerged.

"No--there seems to have been something like a riot at Darwen's church,"

observed the Archdeacon. "What can they expect? You don't outrage people's dearest feelings for nothing. The scandal and misery of it! Of course we shall put it down--but the Church won't recover for a generation. And all that this handful of agitators may advertise themselves and their opinions!"

Canon Dornal frowned and fidgeted.

"We must remember," he said, "that--unfortunately--they have the greater part of European theology behind them."

"European theology!" cried the Archdeacon. "I suppose you mean German theology?"

"The same thing--almost," said the Canon, smiling a little sadly.

"And what on earth does German theology matter to us?" retorted the Archdeacon. "Haven't we got theologians of our own? What have the Germans ever done but set up one mare's nest after another, for us to set right?

They've no sooner launched some c.o.c.ksure theory or other than they have to give it up. I don't read German," said the Archdeacon, hastily, "but that's what I understand from the Church papers."

Silence a moment. The Professor looked at the ceiling, a smile twitching the corners of his mouth. The green shade concealed the Dean's expression. He also knew no German, but it did not seem necessary to say so. Canon Dornal looked uncomfortable.

"Do you see who it was that protected Darwen from the roughs outside his church?" he said presently.

Brathay looked up.

"A party of Wesleyans?--cla.s.s-leaders? Yes, I saw. Oh! Darwen has always been on excellent terms with the Dissenters!"

"Meynell too," said the Professor. "That of course is their game. Meynell has always gone for the inclusion of the Dissenters."

"Well, it was Arnold's game!" said the Canon, his look kindling. "Don't let's forget that. Meynell's dream is not unlike his--to include everybody that would be included."

"Except the Unitarians," said the Professor with emphasis--"the deniers of the Incarnation. Arnold drew the line there. So must we."

He spoke with a crisp and smiling decision--as of one in authority. All kinds of a.s.sumptions lay behind his manner. Dornal looked at him with a rather troubled and hostile eye. This whole matter of the coming trial was to him deeply painful. He would have given anything to avoid it; but he did not see how it could be avoided. The extraordinary spread of the Movement indeed had made it impossible.

At this moment one of the vergers of the Cathedral entered the room to say that Mr. Meynell was waiting below. The Dean directed that he should be shown up, and the whole commission dropped their conversational air and sat expectant.