"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 Forked 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, a 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 Forked 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 Forked 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 naivete, 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 L50, 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.



"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 melee, 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 debris 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-a-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.