Once or twice, as she recognized the faces near her, there was a touch of life, even of mockery. There was a moment when she smiled at Catharine—

"You're sweet. You won't say—'I told you so'!"

In one of the intervals when she seemed to have lapsed again into unconsciousness Meynell reported something of the search. They had found her a long distance from the path, at the foot of a steep and rocky scree, some twenty or thirty feet high, down which she must have slipped headlong. There she had lain for some eight hours in the storm before they found her. She neither moved nor spoke when they discovered her, nor had there been any sign of life, beyond the faint beating of the pulse, on the journey down.

The pale dawn was breaking when the doctor arrived. His verdict was at first not without hope. She might live; if there were no internal injuries of importance. The next few hours would show. He sent his motor back to Whinborough Cottage Hospital for a couple of nurses, and prepared, himself, to stay the greater part of the day. He had just gone downstairs to speak to Meynell, and Catharine was sitting by the bed, when Hester once more roused herself.

"How that man hurt me!—don't let him come in again."

Then, in a perfectly hard, clear voice, she added imperiously—"I want to see my mother."

Catharine stooped toward her, in an agitation she found it difficult to conceal.

"Dear Hester!—we are sending a telegram as soon as the post-office is open to Lady Fox-Wilton."

Hester moved her hand impatiently.

"She's not my mother, and I'm glad. Where is—my mother?" She laid a strange, deep emphasis on the word, opening her eyes wide and threateningly. Catharine understood at once that, in some undiscovered way, she knew what they had all been striving to keep from her. It was no time for questioning. Catharine rose quietly.

"She is here, Hester, I will go and tell her."

Leaving one of the maids in charge, Catharine ran down to the doctor, who gave a reluctant consent, lest more harm should come of refusing the interview than of granting it. And as Catharine ran up again to Mary's room she had time to reflect, with self-reproach, on the strange completeness with which she at any rate had forgotten that frail ineffectual woman asleep in Mary's room from the moment of Hester's arrival till now.

But Mary had not forgotten her. When Catharine opened the door, it was to see a thin, phantom-like figure, standing fully dressed, and leaning on Mary's arm. Catharine went up to her with tears, and kissed her, holding her hands close.

"Hester asks for you—for her mother—her real mother. She knows."

"She knows?" Alice stood paralyzed a moment, gazing at Catharine. Then the colour rushed back into her face. "I am coming—I am coming—at once," she said impetuously. "I am quite strong. Don't help me, please. And—let me go in alone. I won't do her harm. If you—and Mary—would stand by the door—I would call in a moment—if—"

They agreed. She went with tottering steps across the landing. On the threshold, Catharine paused; Mary remained a little behind. Alice went in and shut the door.

The blinds in Hester's room were up, and the snow-covered fells rising steeply above the house filled it with a wintry, reflected light; a dreary light, that a large fire could not dispel. On the white bed lay Hester, breathing quickly and shallowly; bright colour now in each sunken cheek. The doctor himself had cut off a great part of her hair—her glorious hair. The rest fell now in damp golden curls about her slender neck, beneath the cap-like bandage which hid the forehead and temples and gave her the look of a young nun. At first sight of her, Alice knew that she was doomed. Do what she would, she could not restrain the low cry which the sight tore from the depths of life.

Hester feebly beckoned. Alice came near, and took the right hand in hers, while Hester smiled, her eyelids fluttering. "Mother!"—she said, so as scarcely to be heard—and then again—"Mother!"

Alice sank down beside her with a sob, and without a word they gazed into each other's eyes. Slowly Hester's filled with tears. But Alice's were dry. In her face there was as much ecstasy as anguish. It was the first look that Hester's soul had ever given her. All the past was in it; and that strange sense, on both sides, that there was no future.

At last Alice murmured:

"How did you know?"

"Philip told me."

The girl stopped abruptly. It had been on her tongue to say—"It was that made me go with him."

But she did not say it. And while Alice's mind, rushing miserably over the past, was trying to piece together some image of what had happened, Hester began to talk intermittently about the preceding weeks. Alice tried to stop her; but to thwart her only produced a restless excitement, and she had her way.

She spoke of Philip with horror, yet with a perfectly clear sense of her own responsibility.

"I needn't have gone—but I would go. There was a devil in me—that wanted to know. Now I know—too much. I'm glad it's over. This life isn't worth while—not for me."

So, from these lips of eighteen, came the voice of the world's old despairs!

Presently she asked peremptorily for Meynell, and he came to her.

"Uncle Richard, I want to be sure"—she spoke strongly and in her natural voice—"am I Philip's wife—or—or not? We were married on January 25th, at the Mairie of the 10th Arrondissement, by a man in a red scarf. We signed registers and things. Then—when we quarrelled—Philip said—he wasn't certain about that woman—in Scotland. You might be right. Tell me the truth, please. Am I—his wife?"

And as the words dropped faintly, the anxiety in her beautiful death-stricken eyes was strange and startling to see. Through all her recklessness, her defiance of authority and custom, could be seen at last the strength of inherited, implanted things; the instinct of a race, a family, overleaping deviation.

Meynell bent over her steadily, and took her hand in both his own.

"Certainly, you are his wife. Have no anxiety at all about that. My inquiries all broke down. There was no Scotch marriage."

Hester said nothing for a little; but the look of relief was clear. Alice on the farther side of the bed dropped her face in her hands. Was it not only forty-eight hours since, in Paris, Meynell had told her that he had received conclusive evidence of the Scotch marriage, and that Hester was merely Philip's victim, not his wife? Passionately her heart thanked him for the falsehood. She saw clearly that Hester's mortal wounds were not all bodily. She was dying partly of self-contempt, self-judgment. Meynell's strong words—his "noble lie"—had lifted, as it were, a fraction of the moral weight that was destroying her; had made a space—a freedom, in which the spirit could move.

So much Alice saw; blind meanwhile to the tragic irony of this piteous stress laid at such a moment, by one so lawless, on the social law!

Thenceforward the poor sufferer was touchingly gentle and amenable. Morphia had been given her liberally, and the relief was great. When the nurses came at midday, however, the pulse had already begun to fail. They could do nothing; and though within call, they left her mainly to those who loved her.

In the early afternoon she asked suddenly for the Communion, and Meynell administered it. The three women who were watching her received it with her. In Catharine's mind, as Meynell's hands brought her the sacred bread and wine, all thought of religious difference between herself and him had vanished, burnt away by sheer heat of feeling. There was no difference! Words became mere transparencies, through which shone the ineffable.

When it was over, Hester opened her eyes—"Uncle Richard!" The voice was only a whisper now. "You loved my father?"

"I loved him dearly—and you—and your mother—for his sake."

He stooped to kiss her cheek.

"I wonder what it'll be like"—she said, after a moment, with more strength—"beyond? How strange that—I shall know before you! Uncle Richard—I'm—I'm sorry!"

At that the difficult tears blinded him, and he could not reply. But she was beyond tears, concentrating all the last effort of the mind on the sheer maintenance of life. Presently she added:

"I don't hate—even Philip now. I—I forget him. Mother!" And again she clung to her mother's hand, feebly turning her face to be kissed.

Once she opened her eyes when Mary was beside her, and smiled brightly.

"I've been such a trouble, Mary—I've spoilt Uncle Richard's life. But now you'll have him all the time—and he'll have you. You dear!—Kiss me. You've got a golden mother. Take care of mine—won't you?—my poor mother!"

So the hours wore on. Science was clever and merciful and eased her pain. Love encompassed her, and when the wintry light failed, her faintly beating heart failed with it, and all was still....

"Richard!—Richard!—Come with me."

So, with low, tender words, Mary tried to lead him away, after that trance of silence in which they had all been standing round the dead. He yielded to her; he was ready to see the doctor and to submit to the absolute rest enjoined. But already there was something in his aspect which terrified Mary. Through the night that followed, as she lay awake, a true instinct told her that the first great wrestle of her life and her love was close upon her.



CHAPTER XXIV

On the day following Hester's death an inquest was held in the dining-room at Burwood. Meynell and old David, the shepherd, stood out chief among the witnesses.

"This poor lady's name, I understand, sir," said the gray-haired Coroner, addressing Meynell, when the first preliminaries were over, "was Miss Hester Fox-Wilton; she was the daughter of the late Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton; she was under age; and you and Lady Fox-Wilton—who is not here, I am told, owing to illness—were her guardians?"

Meynell assented. He stood to the right of the Coroner, leaning heavily on the chair before him. The doctor who had been called in to Hester sat beside him, and wondered professionally whether the witness would get through.

"I understand also," the Coroner resumed, "that Miss Fox-Wilton had left the family in Paris with whom you and Lady Fox-Wilton had placed her, some three weeks ago, and that you have since been in search of her, in company I believe with Miss Fox-Wilton's aunt, Miss Alice Puttenham. Miss Puttenham, I hope, will appear?"

The doctor rose—

"I am strongly of opinion, sir, that, unless for most urgent reasons, Miss Puttenham should not be called upon. She is in a very precarious state, in consequence of grief and shock, and I should greatly fear the results were she to make the effort."

Meynell intervened.

"I shall be able, sir, I think, to give you sufficient information, without its being necessary to call upon Miss Puttenham."

He went on to give an account, as guarded as he could make it, of Hester's disappearance from the family with whom she was boarding, of the anxiety of her relations, and the search that he and Miss Puttenham had made.

His conscience was often troubled. Vaguely, his mind was pronouncing itself all the while—"It is time now the truth were known. It is better it should be known." Hester's death had changed the whole situation. But he could himself take no step whatever toward disclosure. And he knew that it was doubtful whether he should or could have advised Alice to take any.

The inquiry went on, the Coroner avoiding the subject of Hester's French escapade as much as possible. After all there need be—there was—no question of suicide; only some explanation had to be suggested of the dressing-bag left within the garden gate, and of the girl's reckless climb into the fells, against old David's advice, on such an afternoon.

Presently, in the midst of David's evidence, describing his meeting with Hester by the bridge, the handle of the dining-room door turned. The door opened a little way and then shut again. Another minute or two passed, and then the door opened again timidly as though some one were hesitating outside. The Coroner annoyed, beckoned to a constable standing behind the witnesses. But before he could reach it, a lady had slowly pushed it open, and entered the room.

It was Alice Puttenham.

The Coroner looked up, and the doctor rose in astonishment. Alice advanced to the table, and stood at the farther end from the Coroner, looking first at him and then at the jury. Her face—emaciated now beyond all touch of beauty—and the childish overhanging lip quivered as she tried to speak; but no words came.

"Miss Puttenham, I presume?" said the Coroner. "We were told, madam, that you were not well enough to give evidence."

Meynell was at her side.

"What do you wish?" he said, in a low voice, as he took her hand.

"I wish to give evidence," she said aloud.

The doctor turned toward the Coroner.

"I think you will agree with me, sir, that as Miss Puttenham has made the effort, she should give her evidence as soon as possible, and should give it sitting."

A murmur of assent ran round the table. Over the weather-beaten Westmoreland faces had passed a sudden wave of animation.

Alice took her seat, and the oath. Meynell sitting opposite to her covered his face with his hands. He foresaw what she was about to do, and his heart went out to her.

Everybody at the table bent forward to listen. The two shorthand writers lifted eager faces.

"May I make a statement?" The thin voice trembled through the room.

The Coroner assured the speaker that the Court was willing and anxious to hear anything she might have to say.

Alice fixed her eyes on the old man, as though she would thereby shut out all his surroundings.

"You are inquiring, sir—into the death—of my daughter."

The Coroner made a sudden movement.

"Your daughter, madam? I understood that, this poor young lady was the daughter of the late Sir Ralph and Lady Fox-Wilton?"

"She was their adopted daughter. Her father was Mr. Neville Flood, and I—am her mother. Mr. Flood, of Sandford Abbey, died nearly twenty years ago. He and I were never married. My sister and brother-in-law adopted the child. She passed always as theirs, and when Sir Ralph died, he appointed—Mr. Meynell—and my sister her guardians. Mr. Meynell has always watched over her—and me. Mr. Flood was much attached to him. He wrote to Mr. Meynell, asking him to help us—just before his death."

She paused a moment, steadying herself by the table.

There was not a sound, not a movement in the room. Only Meynell uncovered his eyes and tried to meet hers, so as to give her encouragement.

She resumed—

"Last August the nurse who attended me—in my confinement—came home to Upcote. She made a statement to a gentleman there—a false statement—and then she died. I wished then to make the truth public—but Mr. Meynell—as Hester's guardian—and for her sake, as well as mine—did not wish it. She knew nothing—then; and he was afraid of its effect upon her. I followed his advice, and took her abroad, in order to protect her from a bad man who was pursuing her. We did all we could—but we were not able to protect her. They were married without my knowing—and she went away with him. Then he—this man—told her—or perhaps he had done it before, I don't know—who she was. I can only guess how he knew; but he is Mr. Flood's nephew. My poor child soon found out what kind of man he was. She tried to escape from him. And because Mrs. Elsmere had been always very kind to her, she came here. She knew how—"

The voice paused, and then with difficulty shaped its words again.

"She knew that we should grieve so terribly. She shrank from seeing us. She thought we might be here—and that—partly—made her wander away again—in despair—when she actually got here. But her death was a pure accident—that I am sure of. At the last, she tried to get home—to me. That was the only thing she was conscious of—before she fell. When she was dying—she told me she knew—I was her mother. And now—that she is dead—"

The voice changed and broke—a sudden cry forced its way through—

"Now that she is dead—no one else shall claim her—but me. She's mine now—my child—forever—only mine!"

She broke off incoherently, bowing her head upon her hands, her slight shoulders shaken by her sobs.

The room was silent, save for a rather general clearing of throats. Meynell signalled to the doctor. They both rose and went to her. Meynell whispered to her.

The Coroner spoke, drawing his handkerchief hastily across his eyes.

"The Court is very grateful to you, Miss Puttenham, for this frank and brave statement. We tender you our best thanks. There is no need for us to detain you longer."

She rose, and Meynell led her from the room. Outside was a nurse to whom he resigned her.

"My dear, dear friend!" Trembling, her eyes met the deep emotion in his. "That was right—that will bring you help. Aye! you have her now—all, all your own."

On the day of Hester's burying Long Whindale lay glittering white under a fitful and frosty sunshine. The rocks and screes with their steep beds of withered heather made dark scrawls and scratches on the white; the smoke from the farmhouses rose bluish against the snowy wall of fell; and the river, amid the silence of the muffled roads and paths, seemed the only audible thing in the valley.

In the tiny churchyard the new-made grave had been filled in with frozen earth, and on the sods lay flowers piled there by Rose Flaxman's kind and busy hands. She and Hugh had arrived from the south that morning.

Another visitor had come from the south, also to lay flowers on that wintry grave. Stephen Barron's dumb pain was bitter to see. The silence of spiritual and physical exhaustion in which Meynell had been wrapped since the morning of the inquest was first penetrated and broken up by the sight of Stephen's anguish. And in the attempt to comfort the younger, the elder man laid hold on some returning power for himself.

But he had been hardly hit; and the depth of the wound showed itself strangely—in a kind of fear of love itself, a fear of Mary! Meynell's attitude toward her during these days was almost one of shrinking. The atmosphere between them was electrical; charged with things unspoken, and a conflict that must be faced.

* * * * *

The day after Hester's funeral the newspapers were full of the sentence delivered on the preceding day, in the Arches Court, on Meynell and his co-defendants. A telegram from Darwen the evening before had conveyed the news to Meynell himself.

The sentence of deprivation ab officio et beneficio in the Church of England, on the ground of heretical opinion and unauthorized services, had been expressed by the Dean of Arches in a tone and phraseology of considerable vehemence. According to him the proceedings of the Modernists were "as contrary to morality as to law," and he marvelled how "honest men" could consent to occupy the position of Meynell and his friends.

Notice of appeal to the Privy Council was at once given by the Modernist counsel, and a flame of discussion arose throughout England.

Meanwhile, on the morning following the publication of the judgment, Meynell finished a letter, and took it into the dining-room, where Rose and Mary were sitting. Rose, reading his face, disappeared, and he put the letter into Mary's hands.

It was addressed to the Bishop of Dunchester. The great gathering in Dunchester Cathedral, after several postponements to match the delays in the Court of Arches, was to take place within a fortnight from this date, and Meynell had been everywhere announced as the preacher of the sermon, which was to be the battle-cry of the Movement, in the second period of its history; the period of open revolt, of hot and ardent conflict.

The letter which Mary was invited to read was short. It simply asked that the writer should be relieved from a task he felt he could not adequately carry out. He desired to lay it down, not for his own sake, but for the sake of the cause. "I am not the man, and this is not my job. This conviction has been borne in upon me during the last few weeks with an amazing clearness. I will only say that it seems to represent a command—a prohibition—laid upon me, which I cannot ignore. There are of course tragic happenings and circumstances connected with it, my dear lord, on which I will not dwell. The effect of them at present on my mind is that I wish to retire from a public and prominent part in our great Movement; at any rate for a time. I shall carry through the Privy Council appeal; but except for that intend to refuse all public appearance. When the sentence is confirmed, as of course it will be, it will be best for me to confine myself to thinking and writing in solitude and behind the scenes. 'Those also serve who only stand and wait.' The quotation is hackneyed, but it must serve. Through thought and self-proving, I believe that in the end I shall help you best. I am not the fighter I thought I was; the fighter that I ought to be to keep the position that has been so generously given me. Forgive me for a while if I go into the wilderness—a rather absurd phrase, however, as you will agree, when I tell you that I am soon to marry a woman whom I love with my whole heart. But it applies to my connection with the Modernist Movement, and to my position as a leader. My old friends and colleagues—many of them at least—will, I fear, blame the step I am taking. It will seem to them a mere piece of flinching and cowardice. But each man's soul is in his own keeping; and he alone can judge his own powers."

The letter then became a quiet discussion of the best man to be chosen in the writer's stead, and passed on into a review of the general situation created by the sentence of the Court of Arches.

But of these later pages of the letter Mary realized nothing. She sat with it in her hands, after she had read the passage which has been quoted, looking down, her mouth trembling.

Meynell watched her uneasily—then came to sit by her, and took her hand.

"Dearest!—you understand?" he said, entreatingly.

"It is—because of Hester?" She spoke with difficulty.

He assented, and then added—

"But that letter—shall only go with your permission."

She took courage. "Richard, you know so much better than I, but—Richard!—did you ever neglect Hester?"

He tried to answer her question truly.

"Not knowingly."

"Did you ever fail to love her, and try to help her?"

He drew a long breath.

"But there she lies!" He raised his head. Through the window, on a rocky slope, half a mile away, could be seen the tiny church of Long Whindale, and the little graveyard round it.

"It is very possible that I see the thing morbidly"—he turned to her again with a note of humility, of sad appeal, that struck most poignantly on the woman's heart—"but I cannot resist it. What use can I be to any human being as guide, or prophet, or counsellor—if I was so little use to her? Is there not a kind of hypocrisy—a dismal hypocrisy—in my claim to teach—or inspire—great multitudes of people—when this one child—who was given into my care—"

He wrung her hands in his, unable to finish his sentence.

Bright tears stood in her eyes; but she persevered. She struck boldly for the public, the impersonal note. She set against the tragic appeal of the dead the equally tragic appeal of the living. She had in her mind the memory of that London church, with the strained upturned faces, the "hungry sheep"—girls among them, perhaps, in peril like Hester, men assailed by the same vile impulses that had made a brute of Philip Meryon. During the preceding months Mary's whole personality had developed with great rapidity, after a somewhat taciturn and slowly ripening youth. The need, enforced upon her by love itself, of asserting herself even against the mother she adored; the shadow of Meynell's cloud upon her, and her suffering under it, during the weeks of slander; and now this rending tragedy at her doors—had tempered anew the naturally high heart, and firm will. At this critical moment, she saved Meynell from a fatal step by the capacity she showed of loving his cause, only next to himself. And, indeed, Meynell was made wholesomely doubtful once or twice whether it were not in truth his cause she loved in him. For the sweet breakdowns of love which were always at her lips she banished by a mighty effort, till she should have won or lost. Thus throughout she showed herself her mother's daughter—with her father's thoughts.

It was long, however, before she succeeded in making any real impression upon him. All she could obtain at first was delay, and that Catharine should be informed.

As soon as that had been done, the position became once more curiously complex. Here was a woman to whom the whole Modernist Movement was anathema, driven finally into argument for the purpose of compelling the Modernist leader, the contriver and general of Modernist victory, to remain at his post!

For it was part of Catharine's robust character to look upon any pledge, any accepted responsibility, as something not to be undone by any mere feeling, however sharp, however legitimate. You had undertaken the thing, and it must, at all costs, be carried through. That was the dominant habit of her mind; and there were persons connected with her on whom the rigidity of it had at times worked harshly.

On this occasion it was no doubt interfered with—(the Spirit of Comedy would have found a certain high satisfaction in the dilemma)—by the fact that Meynell's persistence in the course he had entered upon must be, in her eyes, and sub specie religionis, a persistence in heresy and unbelief. What decided it ultimately, however, was that she was not only an orthodox believer, but a person of great common sense—and Mary's mother.

Her natural argument was that after the tragic events which had occurred, and the public reports of them which had appeared, Meynell's abrupt withdrawal from public life would once more unsettle and confuse the public mind. If there had been any change in his opinions—

"Oh! do not imagine"—she turned a suddenly glowing face upon him—"I should be trying to dissuade you, if that were your reason. No!—it is for personal and private reasons you shrink from the responsibility of leadership. And that being so, what must the world say—the ignorant world that loves to think evil?"

He looked at her a little reproachfully.

"Those are not arguments that come very naturally from you!"

"They are the right ones!—and I am not ashamed of them. My dear friend—I am not thinking of you at all. I leave you out of count; I am thinking of Alice—and—Mary!"

Catharine unconsciously straightened herself, a touch of something resentful—nay, stern—in the gesture. Meynell stared in stupefaction.

"Alice!—Mary!" he said.

"Up to this last proposed action of yours, has not everything that has happened gone to soften people's hearts? to make them repent doubly of their scandal, and their false witness? Every one knows the truth now—every one who cares; and every one understands. But now—after the effort poor Alice has made—after all that she and you have suffered—you insist on turning fresh doubt and suspicion on yourself, your motives, your past history. Can't you see how people may gossip about it—how they may interpret it? You have no right to do it, my dear Richard!—no right whatever. Your 'good report' belongs not only to yourself—but—to Mary!"

Catharine's breath had quickened; her hand shook upon her knee. Meynell rose from his seat, paced the room and came back to her.

"I have tried to explain to Mary"—he said, desperately—"that I should feel myself a hypocrite and pretender in playing the part of a spiritual leader—when this great—failure—lay upon my conscience."

At that Catharine's tension gave way. Perplexity returned upon her.

"Oh! if it meant—if it meant"—she looked at him with a sudden, sweet timidity—"that you felt you had tried to do for Hester what only grace—what only a living Redeemer—could do for her—"

She broke off. But at last, as Meynell, her junior by fifteen years—her son almost—looked down into her face—her frail, aging, illumined face—there was something in the passion of her faith which challenged and roused his own; which for the moment, at any rate, and for the first time since the crisis had arisen revived in him the "fighter" he had tried to shed.

"The fault was not in the thing preached," he said, with a groan; "or so it seems to me—but in the preacher. The preacher—was unequal to the message."

Catharine was silent. And after a little more pacing he said in a more ordinary tone—and a humble one—

"Does Mary share this view of yours?"

At this Catharine was almost angry.

"As if I should say a word to her about it! Does she know—has she ever known—what you and I knew?"

His eyes, full of trouble, propitiated her. He took her hand and kissed it.

"Bear with me, dear mother! I don't see my way, but Mary—is to me—my life. At any rate, I won't do in a hurry what you disapprove."

Thus a little further delay was gained. The struggle lasted indeed another couple of days, and the aspect of both Meynell and Mary showed deep marks of it by the end. Throughout it Mary made little or no appeal to the mere womanly arts. And perhaps it was the repression of them that cost her most.

On the third day of discussion, while the letter still lay unposted in Meynell's writing-case, he went wandering by himself up the valley. The weather was soft again, and breathing spring. The streams ran free; the buds were swelling on the sycamores; and except on the topmost crags the snow had disappeared from the fells. Harsh and austere the valley was still; the winter's grip would be slow to yield; but the turn of the year had come.

That morning a rush of correspondence forwarded from Upcote had brought matters to a crisis. On the days immediately following the publication of the evidence given at the inquest on Hester the outside world had made no sign. All England knew now why Richard Meynell had disappeared from the Arches Trial, only to become again the prey of an enormous publicity, as one of the witnesses to the finding and the perishing of his young ward. And after Alice Puttenham's statement in the Coroner's Court, for a few days the England interested in Richard Meynell simply held its breath and let him be.

But he belonged to the public; and after just the brief respite that decency and sympathy imposed, the public fell upon him. The Arches verdict had been given; the appeal to the Privy Council had been lodged. With every month of the struggle indeed, as the Modernist attack had grown more determined, and its support more widespread, so the orthodox defence had gathered force and vehemence. Yet through the length and breadth of the country the Modernist petition to Parliament was now kindling such a fire as no resistance could put out. Debate in the House of Commons on the Modernist proposals for Church Reform would begin after Easter. Already every member of the House was being bombarded from both sides by his constituents. Such a heat of religious feeling, such a passion of religious hope and fear, had not been seen in England for generations.

And meanwhile Meynell, whose action had first released the great forces now at work, who as a leader was now doubly revered, doubly honoured by those who clamoured to be led by him, still felt himself utterly unable to face the struggle. Heart and brain were the prey of a deadly discouragement; the will could make no effort; his confidence in himself was lamed and helpless. Not even the growing strength and intensity of his love for Mary could set him, it seemed, spiritually, on his feet.

He left the old bridge on his left, and climbed the pass. And as he walked, some words of Newman possessed him; breathed into his ear through all the wind and water voices of the valley:

Thou to wax fierce In the cause of the Lord To threat and to pierce With the heavenly sword! Anger and Zeal And the Joy of the brave Who bade thee to feel—

Dejectedly, he made his way along the fatal path; he found the ruin where Hester had sheltered; he gradually identified the route which the rescue party had taken along the side of the fell; and the precipitous scree where they had found her. The freshly disturbed earth and stones still showed plainly where she had fallen, and where he and the shepherds had stood, trampling the ground round her. He sat down beside the spot, haunted by the grim memory of that helpless, bleeding form amid the snow. Not yet nineteen!—disgraced—ruined—the young body broken in its prime. Had he been able to do no better for Neville's child than that? The load of responsibility crushed him; and he could not resign himself to such a fate for such a human being. Before him, on the chill background of the tells, he beheld, perpetually, the two Hesters: here, the radiant, unmanageable child, clad in the magic of her teasing, provocative beauty; there, the haggard and dying girl, violently wrenched from life. Religious faith was paralyzed within him. How could he—a man so disowned of God—prophesy to his brethren?....

Thus there descended upon him the darkest hour of his history. It was simply a struggle for existence on the part of all those powers of the soul that make for action, against the forces that make for death and inertia.

It lasted long; and it ended in the slow and difficult triumph, the final ascendency of the "Yeas" of Life over the "Nays," which in truth his character secured. He won the difficult fight not as a philosopher, but as a Christian; impelled, chastened, brought into line again, by purely Christian memories and Christian ideas. The thought of Christ healed him—gradually gave him courage to bear an agony of self-criticism, self-reproach, that was none the less overwhelming because his calmer mind, looking on, knew it to be irrational. There was no prayer to Christ, no "Christe eleison" on his rips. But there was a solemn kneeling by the Cross; a solemn opening of the mind to the cleansing and strengthening forces that flow from that life and death which are Christendom's central possession; the symbol through which, now understood in this way, now in that, the Eternal speaks to the Christian soul.

So, amid "the cheerful silence of the fells," a good man, heavily, took back his task. From this wreck of affection, this ruin of hope, he must go forth to preach love and hope to other men; from the depths of his grief and his defeat he must summon others to struggle and victory.

He submitted.

Then—not till then—naked and stripped as he was of all personal complacency; smarting under the conviction of personal weakness and defeat; tormented still, as he would ever be, by all the "might have beens" of Hester's story, he was conscious of the "supersensual moment," the inrush of Divine strength, which at some time or other rewards the life of faith.

On his way back to Burwood through the gleams and shadows of the valley, he turned aside to lay a handful of green moss on the new-made grave. There was a figure beside it. It was Mary, who had been planting snowdrops. He helped her, and then they descended to the main road together. Looking at his face, she hardly dared, close as his hand clung to hers, to break the silence.

It was dusk, and there was no one in sight. In the shelter of a group of trees, he drew her to him.

"You have your way," he said, sadly.

She trembled a little, her delicate cheek close against his.

"Have I persecuted you?"

He smiled.

"You have taught me what the strength of my wife's will is going to be."

She winced visibly, and the tears came into her eyes.

"Dearest!—" he protested. "Must you not be strong? But for you—I should have gone under."

The primitive instinct of the woman, in this hour of painful victory, would have dearly liked to disavow her own power. The thought of ruling her beloved was odious. Yet as they walked on hand in hand, the modern in Mary prevailed, and she must needs accept the equal rights of a love which is also life's supreme friendship.

A few more days Meynell spent in the quiet of the valley, recovering, as best he could, and through a struggle constantly renewed, some normal steadiness of mood and nerve; dealing with an immense correspondence; and writing the Dunchester sermon; while Stephen Barron, who had already resigned his own living, was looking after the Upcote Church and parish. Meanwhile Alice Puttenham lay upstairs in one of the little white rooms of Burwood, so ill that the doctors would not hear of her being moved. Edith Fox-Wilton had proposed to come and nurse her, in spite of "this shocking business which had disgraced us all." But Catharine at Alice's entreaty had merely appealed to the indisputable fact that the tiny house was already more than full. There was no danger, and they had a good trained nurse.

Once or twice it was, in these days, that again a few passing terrors ran through Mary's mind, on the subject of her mother. The fragility which had struck Meynell's unaccustomed eye when he first arrived in the valley forced itself now at times, though only at times, on her reluctant sense. There were nights when, without any definite reason, she could not sleep for anxiety. And then again the shadow entirely passed away. Catharine laughed at her; and when the moment came for Mary to follow Meynell to the Dunchester meeting, it was impossible even for her anxious love to persuade itself that there was good reason for her to stay away.

* * * * *

Before Meynell departed southward there was a long conversation between him and Alice; and it was at her wish, to which he now finally yielded, that he went straight to Markborough, to an interview with Bishop Craye.

In that interview the Bishop learnt at last the whole story of Hester's birth and of her tragic death. The beauty of Meynell's relation to the mother and child was plainly to be seen through a very reticent narrative; and to the tale of those hours in Long Whindale no man of heart like the little Bishop could have listened unmoved. At the end, the two men clasped hands in silence; and the Bishop looked wistfully at the priest that he and the diocese were so soon to lose.

For the rest, as before, they met as equals, curiously congenial to each other, in spite of the battle in front. The Bishop's certainty of victory was once more emphatically shown by the friendly ease with which he still received his rebellious incumbent. Any agreeable outsider of whatever creed—Renan or Loisy or Tyrrell—might have been thus welcomed at the Palace. It was true that till the appeal was decided Meynell remained formally Rector of Upcote Minor. The church and the parish were still in his hands; and the Bishop pointedly made no reference to either. But a very few weeks now would see Meynell's successor installed, and the parish reduced to order.

Such at least was the Bishop's confidence, and in the position in which he found himself—with seven Modernist evictions pending in his diocese, and many more than seven recalcitrant parishes to deal with, he was not the man to make needless friction.

In Meynell's view, indeed, the Bishop's confidence was excessive; and the triumph of the orthodox majority in the Church, if indeed it were to triumph, was neither so near, nor likely to be so complete, as the Bishop believed. He had not yet been able to resume all the threads of leadership, but he was clear that there had been no ebbing whatever of the Modernist tide. On the contrary, it seemed to him that the function at Dunchester might yet ring through England, and startle even such an optimist as Bishop Craye.

The next few days he spent among his own people, and with the Flaxmans. The old red sandstone church of Upcote Minor was closely packed on Sunday; and the loyalty of the parish to their Rector, their answer to the Arches judgment, was shown in the passion, the loving intelligence with which every portion of the beautiful Modernist service was followed by an audience of working men and women gathered both from Upcote itself and from the villages round, who knew very well—and gloried in the fact—that from their midst had started the flame now running through the country. Many of them had been trained by Methodism, and were now returning to the Church that Wesley had been so loath to leave. "The Rector's changed summat," said men to each other, puzzled by that aspect—that unconscious aspect—of spiritual dignity that falls like a robe of honour, as life goes on, about the Knights of the Spirit. But they knew, at least, from their newspapers, how and when that beautiful girl who had grown up from a child in their midst had perished; they remembered the winter months of calumny and persecution; and their rough, kind hearts went out to the man who was so soon, against their will and their protest, to be driven out from the church where for twenty years he had preached to his people a Christ they could follow, and a God they could adore.

The week passed, and the Dunchester meeting was at hand. Meynell was to spend the night before the great service with the old Bishop, against whom—together with the whole of his Chapter—Privy Council action was now pending. Mary was to be the guest of one of the Canons in the famous Close.

Meynell arrived to find the beautiful old town in commotion. As a protest against the Modernist demonstration, all the students from a famous Theological College in a neighbouring diocese under a High Church bishop had come over to attend a rival service in the second church of the town, where the congregation was to be addressed "on this outrage to our Lord" by one of the ablest and most saintly of the orthodox leaders—the Rev. Cyril Fenton, of the Markborough diocese—soon, it was rumoured, to be appointed to a Canonry of St. Paul's. The streets were full of rival crowds, jostling each other. Three hundred Modernist clergy were staying in or near the town; the old Cathedral city stared at them amazed; and from all parts had come, besides, the lay followers of the new Movement thronging to a day which represented for them the first fruits of a harvest, whereof not they perhaps but their children would see the full reaping.

On the evening before the function Meynell went into the Cathedral with Mary just as the lengthening March afternoon was beginning to wane. They stepped through the western doors set open to the breeze and the sunshine into a building all opal and ebony, faintly flooded with rose from the sky without; a building of infinite height and majesty, where clustered columns of black marble, incredibly light, upheld the richness of the bossed roof, where every wall was broidered history, where every step was on "the ruined sides of Kings," and the gathered fragments of ancient glass, jewels themselves, let through a jewelled light upon the creamy stone.

For the first time, since Hester's death, Meynell's sad face broke into joy. The glorious church appeared to him as the visible attestation of the Divine creative life in men, flowing on endlessly, from the Past, through the Present, to the unknown Future.

From the distance came a sound of chanting. They walked slowly up the nave, conscious of a strange tumult in the pulse, as though the great building with its immemorial history were half lending itself to, half resisting, the emotion that filled them. In the choir a practice was going on. Some thirty young clergy were going through the responses and canticles of the new service-book, with an elder man, also in clerical dress, directing them. At the entrance of the southern choir aisle stood the senior verger of the Cathedral in his black gown—open-mouthed and motionless, listening to the strange sounds.

Meynell and Mary knelt for a moment of impassioned prayer, and then sat down to listen. Through the fast darkening church, chanted by half the choir, there stole those words of noblest poetry:

"A new commandment—a new commandment—I give unto you ..." To be answered by the voices on the other side—"That ye love—ye love one another!"

And again:

"I have called you friends. Ye are my friends"—

With the reply:

"If ye do the things which I command you."

And yet again:

"The words that I speak unto you:"—

"They—they are spirit; and they are life!"

A moment's silence, before all the voices, gathering into one harmony, sent the last versicle ringing through the arches of the choir, and the springing tracery of the feretory, and of the Lady Chapel beyond.

"Lord to whom shall we go?—Thou—thou hast the words of eternal life!"

"Only a few days or weeks," murmured Meynell, as they passed out into the evening light, "and we two—and those men singing there—shall be outcasts and wanderers, perhaps for a time, perhaps while we live. But to-day—and to-morrow—we are still children in the house of our fathers—sons, not slaves!—speaking the free speech of our own day in these walls, as the men who built them did in theirs. That joy, at least, no one shall take from us!"

At that "sad word Joy" Mary slipped her hand into his, and so they walked silently through the Close, toward the Palace, pursued by the rise and fall of the music from within.

The great service was over, with its bold adaptation of the religious language of the past, the language which is wrought into the being of Christendom, to the needs and the knowledge of the present. And now Meynell had risen, and was speaking to that thronged nave, crowded by men and women of many types and many distinctions, with that mingling of passion and simplicity which underlies success in all the poetic arts, and, first and foremost, the art of religious oratory. The sermon was to be known in after years by the name of "The Two Christianities"—and became one of the chief landmarks, or, rather, rallying cries of the Modernist cause. Only some fragments of it can be suggested here; one passage, above all, that Mary's brooding memory will keep close and warm to her life's end:

"...Why are we here, my friends? For what purpose is this great demonstration, this moving rite in, which we have joined this day? One-sixth at least of this congregation stands here under a sentence of ecclesiastical death. A few weeks perhaps, and this mighty church will know its white-haired Bishop no more. Bishop and Chapter will have been driven out; and we, the rank and file, whose only desire is to cling to the Church in which we were baptized and bred, will find ourselves exiles and homeless.

"What is our crime? This only—that God has spoken in our consciences, and we have not been able to resist Him. Nor dare we desert our posts in the National Church, till force drive us out. Why? Because there is something infinitely greater at stake than any reproach that can be hurled at us on the ground of broken pledges—pledges made too early, given in ignorance and good faith, and broken now, solemnly, in the face of God and this people—for a greater good. What does our personal consistency—which, mind you, is a very different thing from personal honesty!—matter? We are as sensitive as any man who attacks us on the point of personal honour. But we are constrained of God; we bear in our hands the cause of our brethren, the cause of half the nation; and we can no other. Ask yourselves what we have to gain by it. Nay! With expulsion and exile in sight—with years perhaps of the wilderness before us—we stand here for the liberties of Christ's Church!—its liberties of growth and life....

"My friends, what is the life either of intellect or spirit but the response of man to the communication of God? Age by age, man's consciousness cuts deeper into the vast mystery that surrounds us; absorbs, transmutes, translates ever more of truth, into conceptions he can use, and language he can understand.

"From this endless process arise science—and history—and philosophy. But just as science, and history, and philosophy change with this ever-living and growing advance, so religion—man's ideas of God and his own soul.

"Within the last hundred years man's knowledge of the physical world has broadened beyond the utmost dreams of our fathers. But of far greater importance to man is his knowledge of himself. There, too, the century of which we are now the heirs has lifted the veil—for us first among living men—from secrets hitherto unknown. HISTORY has come into being.

"What is history? Simply the power—depending upon a thousand laborious processes—of constructing a magic lens within the mind which allows us to look deep into the past, to see its life and colour and movement again, as no generation but our own has yet been able to see it. We hold our breath sometimes, as for a brief moment perhaps we catch its very gesture, its very habit as it lived, the very tone of its voices. It has been a new and marvellous gift of our God to us; and it has transformed or is transforming Christianity.

"Like science, this new discipline of the human mind is divine and authoritative. It lessens the distance between our human thought and the thought of God, because, in the familiar phrase, it enables us to "think, in some sort, His thoughts after Him." Like science it marches slowly on its way; through many mistakes; through hypothesis and rectification; through daring vision and laborious proof; to an ever-broadening certainty. History has taken hold of the Christian tradition. History has worked upon it with an amazing tenderness, and patience, and reverence. And at the end of a hundred years what do we see?—that half of Christendom, at least, which we in this church represent?

"We see a Christ stripped of Jewish legend, and Greek speculation, and medieval scholasticism; moving simply and divinely among the ways of His Jewish world, a man among men. We can watch, dimly indeed by comparison with our living scrutiny of living men, but still more clearly than any generation of Christendom since the disappearance of the first has been able to watch, the rise of His thoughts, the nature of His environment, the sequence of His acts, the original significance, the immediate interpretation, the subsequent influence of His death. We know much more of Jesus of Nazareth than the fathers of Nicaea knew; probably than St. Paul knew; certainly than Irenaeus or Clement knew.

"But that is only half the truth; only half of what history has to tell. On the one side we have to do with the recovered fact: on the other with its working through two thousand years upon the world.

"There, for the Modernist, lies revelation!—in the unfolding of the Christian idea, through the successive stages of human thought and imagination, it has traversed, down to the burst of revelation in the present day. Yet we are only now at the beginning of an immense development. The content of the Christian idea of love—love, self-renouncing, self-fulfilling—is infinite, inexhaustible, like that of beauty, or of truth. Why? At this moment, I am only concerned to give you the Christian answer, which is the answer of a reasonable faith. Because, like the streams springing forever from 'the pure founts of Cephisus,' to nourish the swelling plains below, these governing ideas of our life—tested by life, confirmed by life—have their source in the very being of God, sharers in His Eternity, His Ever-Fruitfulness....

"But even so, you have not exhausted the wealth of Christianity; For to the potency of the Christian idea is added the magic of an incomparable embodiment in human life. The story of Jesus bears the idea which it enshrines eternally through the world. It is to the idea as the vessel of the Grail.

"... Do these conceptions make us love our Master less? Ask your own hearts? There must be many in this crowded church that have known sorrow—intolerable anguish and disappointment—gnawing self-reproach—during the past year, or months, or weeks; many that have watched sufferings which no philosophic optimism can explain, and catastrophes that leave men dumb. Some among them will have been driven back upon their faith—driven to the foot of the Cross. Through all intellectual difference, has not the natural language of their fathers been also their language? Is there anything in their changed opinions which has cut them off from that sacrifice

"Renewed in every pulse, That on the tedious Cross Told the long hours of death, as, one by one, The life-strings of that tender heart gave way?

"Is there anything in this new compelling knowledge that need—that does—divide us—whose consciences dare not refuse it—from the immortal triumph of that death? In our sharpest straits, are we not comforted and cleansed and sustained by the same thoughts, the same visions that have always sustained and comforted the Christian? No!—the sons of tradition and dogma have no monopoly in the exaltation, the living passion of the Cross! We, too, watching that steadfastness grow steadfast; bowed before that innocent suffering, grow patient; drinking in the wonder of that faith, amid utter defeat, learn to submit and go forward. In us too, as we behold—Hope 'masters Agony!'—and we follow, for a space at least, with our Master, into the heavenly house, and still our sore hearts before our God."

* * * * *

Quietly and low, in tones that shook here and there, the words had fallen upon the spell-bound church.

Mary covered her eyes. But they saw only the more intently the vision of Hester maimed and dying; and the face of Meynell bending over her.

* * * * *

Then from this intimity, this sacredness of feeling, the speaker passed gradually and finally into the challenge, the ringing yet brotherly challenge, it was in truth his mission to deliver. The note of battle—honourable, inevitable battle—pealed through the church, and when it ceased the immense congregation rose, possessed by one heat of emotion, and choir and multitude broke into the magnificent Modernist hymn, "Christus Rex"—written by the Bishop of the See, and already familiar throughout England.

The service was over. Out streamed the great congregation. The Close was crowded to see them come. Lines of theological students were drawn up there, fresh-faced boys in round collars and long black coats, who, as the main body of the Modernist clergy approached, began defiantly to chant the Creed. Meynell, with the old yet stately Bishop leaning on his arm, passed them with a friendly, quiet look. He caught sight for a moment of the tall form of Fenton, standing at their rear—the long face ascetically white, and sternly fixed.

He left the Bishop at the gates of the Palace, and went back quickly for Mary. Suddenly he ran into an advancing figure and found his hand grasped by Dornal.

The two men gazed at each other.

"You were not there?" said Meynell, wondering.

"I was." Dornal hesitated a moment, and then his blue eyes melted and clouded.

"And there was one man there—not a Modernist—who grieved, like a Modernist, over the future!"

"Ah, the future!" said Meynell, throwing his head back. "That is not for you or me—not for the bishops, nor for that body which we call the Church—that is for England to settle."

* * * * *

But another meeting remained.

At the parting with Dornal, Meynell turned a corner and saw in front of him, walking alone, a portly gentleman, with a broad and substantial back. A start ran through him. After a moment's hesitation, he began to quicken his steps, and soon overtook the man in question.

Barron—for it was he—stopped in some astonishment, some confusion even, which he endeavoured to hide. Meynell held out his hand—rather timidly; and Barron just touched it.

"I have been attending the service at St. Mathias," he said, stiffly.

"I imagined so," said Meynell, walking on beside him, and quite unconscious of the fact that a passing group of clergy opposite were staring across the street in amazement at the juxtaposition of the two men, both well known to them. "Did it satisfy you?"

"Certainly. Fenton surpassed himself."

"He has a great gift," said Meynell, heartily. They moved on in silence, till at last Meynell said, with renewed hesitation—"Will you allow me to inquire after Maurice? I hope your mind is more at ease about him."

"He is doing well—for the moment." Another pause—broken by Barron, who said hurriedly in a different voice—"I got from him the whole story of the letters. There was nothing deliberate in it. It was a sudden, monkeyish impulse. He didn't mean as much harm by it as another man would have meant."

"No doubt," said Meynell, struck with pity, as he looked at the sunken face of the speaker. "And anyway—bygones are bygones. I hope your daughter is well?"

"Quite well, I thank you. We are just going abroad."

There was no more to be said. Meynell knew very well that the orthodox party had no room in its ranks, at that moment, for Henry Barron; and it was not hard to imagine what exclusion and ostracism must mean to such a temper. But the generous compunctions in his own mind could find no practical expression; and after a few more words they parted.

* * * * *

Next morning, while every newspaper in the country was eagerly discussing the events at Dunchester, Catharine, in the solitude of Long Whindale, and with a full two hours yet to wait for the carrier who brought the papers from Whinborough, was pondering letters from Rose and Mary written from Dunchester on the preceding afternoon. Her prayer-book lay beside her. Before the post arrived she had been reading by herself the Psalms and Lessons, according to the old-fashioned custom of her youth.

The sweetness of Mary's attempt to bring out everything in the Modernist demonstration that might be bearable or even consoling to Catharine, and to leave untold what must pain her, was not lost upon her mother. Catharine sat considering it, in a reverie half sorrow, half tenderness, her thin hands clasped upon the letter:

* * * * *

"Mother, beloved!—Richard and I talked of you all the way back to the Palace; and though there were many people waiting to see him, he is writing to you now; and so am I. Through it all, he feels so near to you—and to my father; so truly your son, your most loving son....

"Dearest—I am troubled to hear from Alice this morning that yesterday you were tired and even went to lie down. I know my too Spartan mother doesn't do that without ten times as much reason as other people. Oh! do take care of yourself, my precious one. To-morrow, I fly back to you with all my news. And you will meet me with that love of yours which has never failed me, as it never failed my father. It will take Richard and me a life time to repay it. But we'll try! ... Dear love to my poor Alice. I have written separately to her."

* * * * *

Rose's letter was in another vein.

* * * * *

"Dearest Catharine, it is all over—a splendid show, and Richard has come out of it finely, though I must say he looks at times more like a ghost than a man. From the Church point of view, dear, you were wise not to come, for your feelings must have been sadly mixed, and you might have been compelled to take Privy Council proceedings against yourself. I need not say that Hugh and I felt an ungodly delight in it—in the crowd and the excitement—in Richard's sermon—in the dear, long-nosed old Bishop (rather like a camel, between you and me, but a very saintly one) and in the throng of foolish youths from the Theological College who seemed to think they settled everything by singing the Creed at us. (What a pity you can't enjoy the latest description of the Athanasian Creed! It is by a Quaker. He compares it to 'the guesses of a ten-year old child at the contents of his father's library.' Hugh thinks it good—but I don't expect you to.)"

* * * * *

Then followed a vivacious account of the day and its happenings.

"And now comes the real tug of war. In a few weeks the poor Modernists will be all camping in tents, it seems, by the wayside. Very touching and very exciting. But I am getting too sleepy to think about it. Dear Cathie—I run on—but I love you. Please keep well. Good-bye."

* * * * *

Catharine laid the letter down, still smiling against her will over some of its chatter, and unconsciously made happy by the affection that breathed from its pages no less than from Mary's.

Yet certainly she was very tired. She became sharply conscious of her physical weakness as she sat on by the fire, now thinking of her Mary, and now listening for Alice's step upon the stairs. Alice had grown very dear to Catharine, partly for her own sake, and partly because to be in bitter need and helplessness was to be sure of Catharine's tenderness. Very possibly they two, when Mary married, might make their home together. And Catharine promised herself to bring calm at least and loving help to one who had suffered so much.

The window was half open to the first mild day of March; beside it stood a bowl of growing daffodils, and a pot of freesias that scented the room. Outside a robin was singing, the murmur of the river came up through the black buds of the ash-trees, and in the distance a sheep-dog could be heard barking on the fells. So quiet it was—the spring sunshine—and so sweet. Back into Catharine's mind there flowed the memory of her own love-story in the valley; her hand trembled again in the hand of her lover.

Then with a sudden onset her mortal hour came upon her. She tried to move, to call, and could not. There was no time for any pain of parting. For one remaining moment of consciousness there ran through the brain the images, affections, adorations of her life. Swift, incredibly swift, the vision of an opening glory—a heavenly throng!... Then the tired eyelids fell, the head lay heavily on the cushion behind it, and in the little room the song of the robin and the murmur of the stream flowed on—unheard.

THE END