Her voice failed her. She pressed her thin hands together under the onset of memory, and that old conquered anguish which in spite of all the life that had been lived since still smouldered amid the roots of being.

"I may tell you?" she said at last, with a piteous look. Catharine bent over her.

"Anything that will help you. Only remember I don't ask or expect you to say anything."

"I ought"—said Alice miserably—"I ought—because of Mary."

Catharine was silent. She only pressed the hand she held. Alice resumed:

"It was a day that decided all my life. We were so wretched. We thought we could never meet again—it seemed as though we were both—with every station we passed—coming nearer to something like death—something worse than death. Then—before we got to Euston—I couldn't bear it—I—I gave way. We sent a telegram from Euston to Edith that I was going to stay with a school friend in Cornwall—and that night we crossed to Paris—"

She covered her face with her hands a moment; then went on more calmly:

"You'll guess all the rest. I was a fortnight with him in Paris. Then I went home. In a few weeks Edith guessed—and so did Judith Sabin, who was Edith's maid. Edith made me tell her everything. She and Ralph were nearly beside themselves. They were very strict in those days; Ralph was a great Evangelical, and used to speak at the May meetings. All his party looked up to him so—and consulted him. It was a fearful blow to him. But Edith thought of what to do—and she made him agree. We went abroad, she and I—with Judith. It was given out that Edith was delicate, and must have a year away. We stopped about in little mountain places—and Hester was born at Grenoble. And then for the last and only time, they let Neville come to see me—"

Her voice sank. She could only go on in a whisper.

"Three weeks later he was drowned on the Donegal coast. It was called an accident—but it wasn't. He had hoped and hoped to get his wife to divorce him—and make amends. And when Mrs. Flood's—his wife's—final letter came—she was a Catholic and nothing would induce her—he just took his boat out in a storm, and never came back—"

The story lost itself in a long sobbing sigh that came from the depths of life. When she spoke again it was with more strength:

"But he had written the night before to Richard—Richard Meynell. You know he was the Rector's uncle, though he was only seven years older? I had never seen Richard then. But I had often heard of him from Neville. Neville had taken a great fancy to him a year or two before, when Richard was still at college, and Neville was in the Guards. They used to talk of religion and philosophy. Neville was a great reader always—and they became great friends. So on his last night he wrote to Richard, telling him everything, and asking him to be kind to me—and Hester. And Richard—who had just been appointed to the living here—came out to the Riviera, and brought me the letter—and the little book that was in his pocket—when they found him. So you see ..."

She spoke with fluttering colour and voice, as though to find words at all were a matter of infinite difficulty:

"You see that was how Richard came to take an interest in us—in Hester and me—how he came to be the friend too of Ralph and Edith. Poor Ralph!—Ralph was often hard to me, but he meant kindly—he would never have got through at all but for Richard. If Richard was away for a week, he used to fret. That was eighteen years ago—and I too should never have had any peace—any comfort in life again—but for Richard. He found somebody to live with me abroad for those first years, and then, when I came back to Upcote, he made Ralph and Edith consent to my living in that little house by myself—with my chaperon. He would have preferred—indeed he urged it—that I should go on living abroad. But there was Hester!—and I knew by that time that none of them had the least bit of love for her!—she was a burden to them all. I couldn't leave her to them—I couldn't!... Oh! they were terrible, those years!" And again she caught Catharine's hands and held them tight. "You see, I was so young—not much over twenty—and nobody suspected anything. Nobody in the world knew anything—except Judith Sabin, who was in America, and she never knew who Hester's father was—and my own people—and Richard! Richard taught me how to bear it—oh! not in words—for he never preached to me—but by his life. I couldn't have lived at all—but for him. And now you see—you see—how I am paying him back!"

And again, as the rush of emotion came upon her, she threw herself into a wild pleading, as though the gray-haired woman beside her were thwarting and opposing her.

"How can I let my story—my wretched story—ruin his life—and all his work? I can't—I can't! I came to you because you won't look at it as Edith does. You'll think of what's right—right to others. Last night I thought one must die of—misery. I suppose people would call it shame. It seemed to me I heard what they were all saying in the village—how they were gloating over it—after all these years. It seemed to strip one of all self-respect—all decency. And to-day I don't care about that! I care only that Richard shouldn't suffer because of what he did for me—and because of me. Oh! do help me, do advise me! Your look—your manner—have often made me want to come and tell you"—her voice was broken now with stifled sobs—"like a child—a child. Dear Mrs. Elsmere!—what ought I to do?"

And she raised imploring eyes to the face beside her, so finely worn with living and with human service.

"You must think first of Hester," said Catharine, with gentle steadiness, putting her arm round the bent shoulders. "I am sure the Rector would tell you that. She is your first—your sacredest duty."

Alice Puttenham shivered as though something in Catharine's tender voice reproached her.

"Oh, I know—my poor Hester! My life has set hers all wrong. Wouldn't it have been better to face it all from the beginning—to tell the truth—wouldn't it?" She asked it piteously.

"It might have been. But the other way was chosen; and now to undo it—publicly—affects not you only, but Hester. It mayn't be possible—it mayn't be right."

"I must!—I must!" said Alice impetuously, and rising to her feet she began to pace the room again with wild steps, her hands behind her, her slender form drawn tensely to its height.

At that moment Catharine became aware of some one standing in the porch just beyond the drawing-room of the tiny cottage.

"This may be Mr. Meynell." She rose to admit him.

Alice stood expectant. Her outward agitation disappeared. Some murmured conversation passed between the two persons in the little hall. Then Catharine came in again, followed by Meynell, who closed the door, and stood looking sadly at the pale woman confronting him.

"So they haven't spared even you?" he said at last, in a voice bitterly subdued. "But don't be too unhappy. It wants courage and wisdom on our part. But it will all pass away."

He quietly pushed a chair toward Alice, and then took off his dripping cloak, carried it into the passage outside, and returned.

"Don't go, Mrs. Elsmere," he said, as he perceived Catharine's uncertainty. "Stay and help us, if you will."

Catharine submitted. She took her accustomed seat by the fire; Alice, or the ghost of Alice, sat opposite to her, in Mary's chair, surrounded by Mary's embroidery things; and Meynell was between them.

He looked from one to the other, and there was something in his aspect which restrained Alice's agitation, and answered at once to some high expectation in Catharine.

"I know, Mrs. Elsmere, that you have received one of the anonymous letters that are being circulated in this neighbourhood, and I presume also—from what I see—that Miss Puttenham has given you her confidence. We must think calmly what is best to do. Now—the first person who must be in all our minds—is Hester."

He bent forward, looking into Alice's face, without visible emotion; rather with the air of peremptory common sense which had so often helped her through the difficulties of her life.

She sat drooping, her head on her hand, making no sign.

"Let us remember these facts," he resumed. "Hester is in a critical state of life and mind. She imagines herself to be in love with my cousin Philip Meryon, a worthless man, without an ounce of conscience where women are concerned, who, in my strong belief, is already married under the ambiguities of Scotch law, though his wife, if she is his wife, left him some years ago, detests him, and has never been acknowledged. I have convinced him at last—this morning—that I mean to bring this home to him. But that does not dispose of the thing—finally. Hester is in danger—in danger from herself. She is at war with her family—with the world. She believes nobody loves her—that she is and always has been a pariah at home—and with her temperament she is in a mood for desperate things. Tell her now that she is illegitimate—let your sister Edith go talking to her about 'disgrace'—and there is no saying what will happen. She will say—and think—that she has no responsibilities, and may do what she pleases. There is no saying what she might do. We might have a tragedy that none of us could prevent."

Alice lifted her head.

"I could go away with her," she said, imploringly. "I could watch over her day and night. But let me put this thing straight now publicly. Indeed—indeed, it is time."

"You mean you wish to bring an action? In that case you would have to return to give evidence."

"Yes—for a short time. But that could be managed. She should never see the English papers—I could promise that."

"And what is to prevent Philip Meryon telling her? At present he is entirely ignorant of her parentage. I have convinced myself of that this morning. He has no dealings with the people here, nor they with him. What has been happening here has not reached him. And he is really off to-night. We must, of course, always take the risk of his knowing, and of his telling her. A libel action would convert that risk into a certainty. Would it not simply forward whatever designs he may have on her—for I do not believe for a moment he will abandon them—it will be a duel, rather, between him and us—would it not actually forward his designs—to tell her?"

Alice did not reply. She sat wringing her delicate hands in a silent desperation; while Catharine opposite was lost in the bewilderment of the situation—the insistence of the woman, the refusal of the man.

"My advice is this"—continued Meynell, still addressing Alice—"that you should take her to Paris tomorrow in my stead, and should stay near her for some months. Lady Fox-Wilton—whom I have just seen—she overtook me driving on the Markborough road half an hour ago, and we had some conversation—talks of taking a house at Tours for a year—an excellent thing—for them all. We don't want her on the spot any longer—we don't want any of them!" said the Rector, dismissing the Fox-Wilton family with an emphatic gesture which probably represented what he had gone through in the interview with Edith. ... "In that way the thing will soon die down. There will be nobody here—nobody within reach—for the scoundrel who is writing these letters to attack—except, of course, myself—and I shall know how to deal with it. He will probably tire of the amusement. Other people will be ashamed of having read the letters and believed them. I even dare to hope that Mr. Barron—in time—may be ashamed."

Alice looked at him in tremulous despair.

"Nobody to attack!" she said—"nobody to attack! And you, Richard—you?"

A dry smile flickered on his face.

"Leave that to me—I assure you you may leave it to me."

"Richard!" said Alice imploringly—"just think. I know what you say is very important—very true. But for me personally"—she looked round the room with wandering eyes; then found a sudden passionate gesture, pressing back the hair from her brow with both hands—"for me personally—to tell the truth—to face the truth—would be relief—infinite relief! It would kill the fear in which I have lived all these years—kill it forever. It would be better for all of us if we had told the truth—from the beginning. And as for Hester—she must know—you say yourself she must know before long—when she is of age—when she marries—"

Meynell's face took an unconscious hardness.

"Forgive me!—the matter must be left to me. The only person who could reasonably take legal action would be myself—and I shall not take it. I beg you, be advised by me." He bent forward again. "My dear friend!"—and now he spoke with emotion—"in your generous consideration for me you do not know what you are proposing—what an action in the courts would mean, especially at this moment. Think of the party spirit that would be brought into it—the venom—the prejudice—the base insinuations. No!—believe me—that is out of the question—for your sake—and Hester's."

"And your work—your influence?"

"If they suffer—they must suffer. But do not imagine that I shall not defend myself—and you—you above all—from calumny and lies. Of course I shall—in my own way."

There was silence—a dismal silence. At the end of it Meynell stretched out his hand to Alice with a smile. She placed her own in it, slowly, with a look which filled Catharine's eyes once more with tears.

"Trust me!" said Meynell, as he pressed the hand. "Indeed you may." Then he turned to Catharine Elsmere—

"I think Mrs. Elsmere is with me—that she approves?"

"With one reservation." The words came gravely, after a moment's doubt.

His eyes asked her to be frank.

"I think it would be possible—I think it would be just—if Miss Puttenham were to empower you to go to your Bishop. He too has rights!" said Catharine, her clear skin reddening.

Meynell paused: then spoke with hesitation.

"Yes—that I possibly might do—if you permit me?" He turned again to Alice.

"Go to him—go to him at once!" she said with a sob she could not repress.

Another silence. Then Meynell walked to the window and looked at the weather.

"It is not raining so fast," he said in his cheerful voice. "Oughtn't you to be going home—getting ready and arranging with Hester? It's an awful business going abroad."

Alice rose silently. Catharine went into the kitchen to fetch the waterproof which had been drying.

Alice and Meynell were left alone.

She looked up.

"It is so hard to be hated!" she said passionately—"to see you hated. It seems to burn one's heart—the coarse and horrible things that are being said—"

He frowned and fidgeted—till the thought within forced its way:

"Christ was hated. Yet directly the least touch of it comes to us, we rebel—we cry out against God."

"It is because we are so weak—we are not Christ!" She covered her face with her hands.

"No—but we are his followers—if the Life that was in him is in us too. 'Life that in me has rest—as I—Undying Life—have power in Thee!'" He fell—murmuring—into lines that had evidently been in his thoughts, smiling upon her.

Then Catharine returned. Alice was warmly wrapped up, and Catharine took her to the door, leaving Meynell in the sitting-room.

"We will come and help you this evening—Mary and I," she said tenderly, as they stood together in the little passage.

"Mary?" Alice looked at her in a trembling uncertainty.

"Mary—of course."

Alice thought a moment, and then said with a low intensity, a force to which Catharine had no clue—"I want you—to tell her—the whole story. Will you?"

Catharine kissed her cheek in silence, and they parted.

* * * * *

Catharine went slowly back to the little sitting-room. Meynell was standing abstracted before the fire, his hands clasped in front of him, his head bent. Catharine approached him—drawing quick breath.

"Mr. Meynell—what shall I do—what do you wish me to do or say—with regard to my daughter?"

He turned—pale with amazement.

And so began what one may call—perhaps—the most romantic action of a noble life!



CHAPTER XVII

When Catharine returned to the little sitting-room, in which the darkness of a rainy October evening was already declaring itself, she came shaken by many emotions in which only one thing was clear—that the man before her was a good man in distress, and that her daughter loved him.

If she had been of the true bigot stuff she would have seen in the threatened scandal a means of freeing Mary from an undesirable attachment. But just as in her married life, her heart had not been able to stand against her husband while her mind condemned him, so now. While in theory, and toward people with whom she never came in contact, she had grown even more bitter and intransigent since Robert's death than she had been in her youth, she had all the time been living the daily life of service and compassion which—unknown to herself—had been the real saving and determining force. Impulses of love, impulses of sacrifice toward the miserable, the vile, and the helpless—day by day she had felt them, day by day she had obeyed them. And thus all the arteries, so to speak, of the spiritual life had remained soft and pliant—that life itself in her was still young. It was there in truth that her Christianity lay; while she imagined it to lie in the assent to certain historical and dogmatic statements. And so strong was this inward and vital faith—so strengthened in fact by mere living—that when she was faced with this second crisis in her life, brought actually to close grips with it, that faith, against all that might have been expected, carried her through the difficult place with even greater sureness than at first. She suffered indeed. It seemed to her all through that she was endangering Mary, and condoning a betrayal of her Lord. And yet she could not act upon this belief. She must needs act—with pain often, and yet with mysterious moments of certainty and joy, on quite another faith, the faith which has expressed itself in the perennial cry of Christianity: "Little children, love one another!" And therein lay the difference between her and Barron.

It was therefore in this mixed—and yet single—mood that she came back to Meynell, and asked him—quietly—the strange question: "What shall I do—what do you wish me to do or say—with regard to my daughter?"

Meynell could not for a moment believe that he had heard aright. He stared at her in bewilderment, at first pale, and then in a sudden heat and vivacity of colour.

"I—I hardly understand you, Mrs. Elsmere."

They stood facing each other in silence.

"Surely we need not inform her," he said, at last, in a low voice.

"Only that a wicked and untrue story has been circulated—that you cannot, for good reasons, involving other persons, prosecute those responsible for it in the usual way. And if she comes across any signs of it, or its effects, she is to trust your wisdom in dealing with it—and not to be troubled—is not that what you would like me to say?"

"That is indeed what I should like you to say." He raised his eyes to her gravely.

"Or—will you say it yourself?"

He started.

"Mrs. Elsmere!"—he spoke with quick emotion—"You are wonderfully good to me." He scanned her with an unsteady face—then made an agitated step toward her. "It almost makes me think—you permit me—"

"No—no," said Catharine, hurriedly, drawing back. "But if you would like to speak to Mary—she will be here directly."

"No!"—he said, after a moment, recovering his composure—"I couldn't! But—will you?"

"If you wish it." Then she added, "She will of course never ask a question; it will be her business to know nothing of the matter—in itself. But she will be able to show you her confidence, and to feel that we have treated her as a woman—not a child."'

Meynell drew a deep breath. He took Catharine's hand and pressed it. She felt with a thrill—which was half bitterness—that it was already a son's look he turned upon her.

"You—you have guessed me?" he said, almost inaudibly.

"I see there is a great friendship between you."

"Friendship!" Then he restrained himself sharply. "But I ought not to speak of it—to intrude myself and my affairs on her notice at all at this moment...." He looked at his companion almost sternly. "Is it not clear that I ought not? I meant to have brought her a book to-day. I have not brought it. I have been even glad—thankful—to think you were going away, although—" But again he checked the personal note. "The truth is I could not endure that through me—through anything connected with me—she might be driven upon facts and sorrows—ugly facts that would distress her, and sorrows for which she is too young. It seemed to me indeed I might not be able to help it. But at the same time it was clear to me, to-day, that at such a time—feeling as I do—I ought not in the smallest degree to presume upon her—and your—kindness to me. Above all"—his voice shook—"I could not come forward—I could not speak to her—as at another time I might have spoken. I could not run the smallest risk—of her name being coupled with mine—when my character was being seriously called in question. It would not have been right for her; it would not have been seemly for myself. So what was there—but silence? And yet I felt—that through this silence—we should somehow trust each other!"

He paused a moment, looking down upon his companion. Catharine was sitting by the fire near a small table on which her elbow rested, her face propped on her hand. There was something in the ascetic refinement, the grave sweetness of her aspect, that played upon him with a tonic and consoling force. He remembered the frozen reception she had given him at their first meeting; and the melting of her heart toward him seemed a wonderful thing. And then came the delicious thought—"Would she so treat him, unless Mary—Mary!—"

But, at the same time, there was in him the mind of the practical man, which plainly and energetically disapproved her. And presently he tried, with much difficulty, to tell her so, to impress upon her—upon her, Mary's mother—that Mary must not be allowed to hold any communication with him, to show any kindness toward him, till this cloud had wholly cleared away, and the sky was clear again. He became almost angry as he urged this; so excited, indeed, and incoherent that a charming smile stole into Catharine's gray eyes.

"I understand quite what you feel," she said as she rose, "and why you feel it. But I am not bound to follow your advice—or to agree with you—am I?"

"Yes, I think you are," he said stoutly.

Then a shadow fell over her face.

"I suppose I am doing a strange thing"—her manner faltered a little—"but it seems to me right—I have been led—else why was it so plain?"

She raised her clear eyes, and he understood that she spoke of those "hints" and "voices" of the soul that play so large a part in the more mystical Christian experience. She hurried on:

"When two people—two people like you and Mary—feel such a deep interest in each other—surely it is God's sign." Then, suddenly, the tears shone. "Oh, Mr. Meynell!—trial brings us nearer to our Saviour. Perhaps—through it—you and Mary—will find Him!"

He saw that she was trembling from head to foot; and his own emotion was great.

He took her hand again, and held it in both his own.

"Do you imagine," he said huskily "that you and I are very far apart?"

And again the tenderness of his manner was a son's tenderness.

She shook her head, but she could not speak. She gently withdrew her hand, and turned aside to gather up some letters on the table.

A sound of footsteps could be heard outside. Catharine moved to the window.

"It is Mary," she said quietly. "Will you wait a little while I meet her?" And without giving him time to reply, she left the room.

He walked up and down, not without some humorous bewilderment in spite of his emotion. The saints, it seemed, are persons of determination! But, after a minute, he thought of nothing, realized nothing, save that Mary was in the little house again, and that one of those low voices he could just hear, as a murmur in the distance, through the thin walls of the cottage, was hers.

The door opened softly, and she came in. Though she had taken off her hat, she still wore her blue cloak of Irish frieze, which fell round her slender figure in long folds. Her face was rosy with rain and wind; the same wind and rain which had stamped such a gray fatigue on Alice Puttenham's cheeks. Amid the dusk, the fire-light touched her hair and her ungloved hand. She was a vision of youth and soft life; and her composure, her slight, shy smile, would alone have made her beautiful.

Their hands met as she gently greeted him. But there was that in his look which disturbed her gentleness—which deepened her colour. She hurried to speak.

"I am so glad that mother made you stay—just that I might tell you." Then her breath began to hasten. "Mother says you are—or may be—unjustly attacked—that you don't think it right to defend yourself publicly—and those who follow you, and admire you, may be hurt and troubled. I wanted to say—and mother approves—that whoever is hurt and troubled, I can never be—except for you. Besides, I shall know and ask nothing. You may be sure of that. And people will not dare to speak to me."

She stood proudly erect.

Meynell was silent for a moment. Then, by a sudden movement, he stooped and kissed a fold of her cloak. She drew back with a little stifled cry, putting out her hands, which he caught. He kissed them both, dropped them, and walked away from her.

When he returned it was with another aspect.

"Don't let's make too much of this trouble. It may all die away—or it may be a hard fight. But whatever happens, you are going to Westmoreland immediately. That is my great comfort."

"Is it?" She laughed unsteadily.

He too smiled. There was intoxication he could not resist—in her presence—and in what it implied.

"It is the best possible thing that could be done. Then—whatever happens—I shall not be compromising my friends. For a while—there must be no communication between them and me."

"Oh, yes!" she said, involuntarily clasping her hands. "Friends may write."

"May they?" He thought it over, with a furrowed brow, then raised it, clear. "What shall they write about?"

An exquisite joyousness trembled in her look.

"Leave it to them!"

Then, as she once more perceived the anxiety and despondency in him, the brightness clouded; pity possessed her: "Tell me what you are preaching—and writing."

"If I preach—if I write. And what will you tell me?"

"'How the water comes down at Lodore,'" she said gayly. "What the mountains look like, and how many rainy days there are in a week."

"Excellent! I perceive you mean to libel the country I love!"

"You can always come and see!" she said, with a shy courage.

He shook his head.

"No. My Westmoreland holiday is given up."

"Because of the Movement?"

And sitting down by the fire, still with that same look of suppressed and tremulous joy, she began to question him about the meetings and engagements ahead. But he would not be drawn into any talk about them. It was no doubt quite possible—though not, he thought, probable—that he might soon be ostracized from them all. But upon this he would not dwell, and though her understanding of the whole position was far too vague to warn her from these questions, she soon perceived that he was unwilling to answer them as usual. Silence indeed fell between them; but it was a silence of emotion. She had thrown off her cloak, and sat looking down, in the light of the fire; she knew that he observed her, and the colour on her cheek was due to something more than the flame at her feet. As they realized each other's nearness indeed, in the quiet of the dim room, it was with a magic sense of transformation. Outside the autumn storm was still beating—symbol of the moral storm which threatened them. Yet within were trust and passionate gratitude and tender hope, intertwined, all of them, with the sacred impulse of the woman toward the man, and of the man toward the woman. Each moment as it passed built up one of those watersheds of life from which henceforward the rivers flow broadening to undreamt-of seas.

* * * * *

When Catharine returned, Meynell was hat in hand for departure. There was no more expression of feeling or reference to grave affairs. They stood a few moments chatting about ordinary things. Incidentally Hugh Flaxman's loss of the two gold coins was mentioned. Meynell inquired when they were first missed.

"That very evening," said Mary. "Rose always puts them away herself. She missed the two little cases at once. One was a coin of Velia, with a head of Athene—"

"I remember it perfectly," said Meynell. "It dropped on the floor when I was talking to Norham—and I picked it up—with another, if I remember right—a Hermes!"

Mary replied that the Hermes too was missing—that both were exceedingly rare; and that in the spring a buyer for the Louvre had offered Hugh four hundred pounds for the two.

"They feel most unhappy and uncomfortable about it. None of the servants seems to have gone into that room during the party. Rose put all the coins on the table herself. She remembers saying good-bye to Canon France and his sister in the drawing-room—and two or three others—and immediately afterward she went into the green drawing-room to lock up the coins. There were two missing."

"She doesn't remember who had been in the room?"

"She vaguely remembers seeing two or three people go in and out—the Bishop!—Canon Dornal!"

They both laughed. Then Meynell's face set sharply. A sudden recollection shot through his mind. He beheld the figure of a sallow, dark-haired young man slipping—alone—through the doorway of the green drawing-room. And this image in the mind touched and fired others, like a spark running through dead leaves....

* * * * *

When he had gone, Catharine turned to Mary, and Mary, running, wound her arms close round her mother, and lay her head on Catharine's breast.

"You angel!—you darling!" she said, and raising her mother's hand she kissed it passionately.

Catharine's eyes filled with tears, and her heart with mingled joy and revolt. Then, quickly, she asked herself as she stood there in her child's embrace whether she should speak of a certain event—certain experience—which had, in truth, though Mary knew nothing of it, vitally affected both their lives.

But she could not bring herself to speak of it.

So that Mary never knew to what, in truth, she owed the painful breaking down of an opposition and a hostility which might in time have poisoned all their relations to each other.

But when Mary had gone away to change her damp clothes, the visionary experience of which Catharine could not tell came back upon her; and again she felt the thrill—the touch of bodiless ecstasy.

It had been in the early morning, when all such things befall. For then the mind is not yet recaptured by life and no longer held by sleep. There is in it a pure expectancy, open to strange influences: influences from memory and the under-soul. It visualizes easily, and dream and fact are one.

In this state Catharine woke on a September morning and felt beside her a presence that held her breathless. The half-remembered images and thoughts of sleep pursued her—became what we call "real."

"Robert!" she said, aloud—very low.

And without voice, it seemed to her that some one replied. A dialogue began into which she threw her soul. Of her body, she was not conscious; and yet the little room, its white ceiling, its open windows, and the dancing shadows of the autumn leaves were all present to her. She poured out the sorrow, the anxiety—about Mary—that pressed so heavy on her heart, and the tender voice answered, now consoling, now rebuking.

"And we forbade him, because he followed not us ... Forbid him not—forbid him not!"—seemed to go echoing through the quiet air.

The words sank deep into her sense—she heard herself sobbing—and the unearthly presence came nearer—though still always remote, intangible—with the same baffling distance between itself and her....

The psychology of it was plain. It was the upthrust into consciousness of the mingled ideas and passions on which her life was founded, piercing through the intellectualism of her dogmatic belief. But though she would have patiently accepted any scientific explanation, she believed in her heart that Robert had spoken to her, bidding her renounce her repugnance to Mary's friendship with Meynell—to Mary's love for Meynell.

She came down the morning after with a strange, dull sense of change and disaster. But the currents of her mind and will had set firmly in a fresh direction. It was almost mechanically—under a strong sense of guidance—that she had made her hesitating proposal to Mary to go with her to the Upcote meeting. Mary's look of utter astonishment had sent new waves of disturbance and compunction through the mother's mind.

* * * * *

But if these things could not be told—even to Mary—there were other revelations to make.

When the lamp had been brought in, and the darkness outside shut out, Catharine laid her hand on Mary's, and told the story of Alice Puttenham.

Mary heard it in silence, growing very pale. Then, with another embrace of her mother, she went away upstairs, only pausing at the door of the sitting-room to ask when they should start for the cottage.

Upstairs Mary sat for long in the dark, thinking.... Through her uncurtained windows she watched the obscure dying away of the storm, the calming of the trees, and the gradual clearing of the night sky. Between the upfurling clouds the stars began to show; tumult passed into a great tranquillity; and a breath of frost began to steal through the woods, and over the water....

Catharine too passed an hour of reflection—and of yearning over the unhappy. Naturally, to Mary, her lips had been sealed on that deepest secret of all, which she had divined for a moment in Alice. She had clearly perceived what was or had been the weakness of the woman, together with the loyal unconsciousness and integrity of the man. And having perceived it, not only pity but the strain in Catharine of plain simplicity and common sense bade her bury and ignore it henceforward. It was what Alice's true mind must desire; and it was the only way to help her. She began however to understand what might be the full meaning of Alice's last injunction—and her eyes grew wet.

* * * * *

Mother and daughter started about eight o'clock for the cottage. They had a lantern with them, but they hardly needed it, for through the tranquillized air a new moon shone palely, and the frost made way. Catharine walked rejoicing apparently in renewed strength and recovered powers of exertion. Some mining, crippling influence seemed to have been removed from her since her dream. And yet, even at this time, she was not without premonitions—physical premonitions—as to the future—faint signal-voices that the obscure life of the body can often communicate to the spirit.

They found the cottage all in light and movement. Servants were flying about; boxes were in the hall; Hester had come over to spend the night at the cottage that she and "Aunt Alice" might start by an early train.

Alice came out to meet her visitors in the little hall. Catharine slipped into the drawing-room. Alice and Mary held each other enwrapped in one of those moments of life that have no outward expression but dimmed eyes and fluttering breath.

"Is it all done? Can't I help?" said Mary at last, scarcely knowing what she said, as Alice released her.

"No, dear, it's all done—except our books. Come up with me while I pack them."

And they vanished upstairs, hand in hand.

Meanwhile Hester in her most reckless mood was alternately flouting and caressing Catharine Elsmere. She was not in the least afraid of Catharine, and it was that perhaps which had originally drawn Catharine's heart to her. Elsmere's widow was accustomed to feel herself avoided by young people who discussed a wild literature, and appeared to be without awe toward God, or reverence toward man. Yet all the time, through her often bewildered reprobation of them, she hungered for their affection, and knew that she carried in herself treasures of love to give—though no doubt, on terms.

But Hester had always divined these treasures, and was, besides, as a rule, far too arrogant and self-centred to restrain herself in anything she wished to say or do for fear of hurting or shocking her elders.

At this moment she had declared herself tired out with packing, and was lounging in an armchair in the little drawing-room. A Japanese dressing-gown of some pale pink stuff sprayed with almond blossom floated about her, disclosing a skimpy silk petticoat and a slender foot from which she had kicked its shoe. Her pearly arms and neck were almost bare; her hair tumbled on her shoulders; her eyes shone with excitement provoked by a dozen hidden and conflicting thoughts. In her beauty, her ardent and provocative youth, she seemed to be bursting out of the little room, with its artistic restraint of colour and furnishing.

"Don't please do any more fussing," she said imploringly to Catharine. "It's all done—only Aunt Alice thinks it's never done. Do sit down and talk."

And she put out an impatient hand, and drew the stately Catharine toward a chair beside her.

"You ought to be in bed," said Catharine, retaining her hand. The girl's ignorance of all that others knew affected her strangely—produced a great softness and compunction.

"I shouldn't sleep. I wonder when I shall get a decent amount of sleep again!" said Hester, pressing back the hair from her cheeks. Then she turned sharply on her visitor:

"Of course you know, Mrs. Elsmere, that I am simply being sent away—in disgrace."

"I know"—Catharine smiled, though her tone was grave—"that those who love you think there ought to be a change."

"That's a nice way of putting it—a real gentlemanly way," said Hester, swaying backward and forward, her hands round her knees. "But all the same it's true. They're sending me away because they don't know what I'll do next. They think I'll do something abominable."

The girl's eyes sparkled.

"Why will you give your guardians this anxiety?" asked Catharine, not without severity. "They are never at rest about you. My dear—they only wish your good."

Hester laughed. She threw out a careless hand and laid it on Catharine's knee.

"Isn't it odd, Mrs. Elsmere, that you don't know anything about me, though—you won't mind, will you?—though you're so kind to me, and I do like you so. But you can't know anything, can you, about girls—like me?"

And looking up from where she lay deep in the armchair, she turned half-mocking eyes on her companion.

"I don't know—perhaps—about girls like you," said Catharine, smiling, and shyly touching the hand on her knee. "But I live half my life—with girls."

"Oh—poor girls? Girls in factories—girls that wear fringes, and sham pearl beads, and six ostrich feathers in their hats on Sundays? No, I don't think I'm like them. If I were they, I shouldn't care about feathers or the sham pearls. I should be more likely to try and steal some real ones! No, but I mean really girls like me—rich girls, though of course I'm not rich—but you understand? Do you know any girls who gamble and paint—their faces I mean—and let men lend them money, and pay for their dresses?"

Hester sat up defiantly, looking at her companion.

"No, I don't know any of that kind," said Catharine quietly. "I'm old-fashioned, you see—they wouldn't want to know me."

Hester's mouth twitched.

"Well, I'm not that kind exactly! I don't paint because—well, I suppose I needn't! And I don't play for money, because I've nobody to play with. As for letting men lend you money—"

"That you would never disgrace yourself by doing!" said Catharine sharply.

Hester's look was enigmatic.

"Well, I never did it. But I knew a girl in London—very pretty—and as mad as you like. She was an orphan and her relatives didn't care twopence about her. She got into debt, and a horrid old man offered to lend her a couple of hundred pounds if she'd give him a kiss. She said no, and then she told an older woman who was supposed to look after her. And what do you suppose she said?"

Catharine was silent.

"'Well, you are a little fool!' That was all she got for her pains. Men are villains—I think! But they're exciting!" And Hester clasped her hands behind her head, and looked at the ceiling, smiling to herself, while the dressing-gown sleeves fell back from her rounded arms.

Catharine frowned. She suddenly rose, and kneeling down by Hester's chair, she took the girl in her arms.

"Hester, dear!—if you want a friend—whenever you want a friend—come to me! If you are ever in trouble send for me. I would always come—always!"

She felt the flutter of the girl's heart as she enfolded her. Then Hester lightly freed herself, though her voice shook—

"You're the kindest person, Mrs. Elsmere—you're awfully, awfully, kind. But I'm going to have a jolly good time in Paris. I shall read all kinds of things—I shall go to the theatre—I shall enjoy myself famously."

"And you'll have Aunt Alice all to yourself."

Hester was silent. The lovely corners of her mouth stiffened.

"You must be very good to her, Hester," said Catharine, with entreaty in her voice. "She's not well—and very tired."

"Why doesn't she trust me?" said Hester, almost between her teeth.

"What do you mean?"

After a hesitating pause, the girl broke out with the story of the miniature.

"How can I love her when she won't trust me?" she cried again, with stormy breath.

Catharine's heart melted within her.

"But you must love her, Hester! Why, she has watched over you all your life. Can't you see—that she's had trouble—and she's not strong!"

And she looked down with emotion on the girl thus blindly marching to a veiled future, unable, by no fault of her own, to distinguish her lovers from her foes. Had a lie, ever yet, in human history, justified itself? So this pure moralist!—to whom morals had come, silently, easily, irresistibly, as the sun slips into the sky.

"Oh, I'll look after her," said Hester shortly; "why, of course I will. I'm very glad she's going to Paris—it'll be good for her. And as for you"—she bent forward like a queen, and lightly kissed Catharine on the cheek—"I daresay I'll remember what you've said—you're a great, great dear! It was luck for Mary to have got you for a mother. But I'm all right—I'm all right!"

* * * * *

When the Elsmeres were gone, Hester still sat on alone in the drawing-room. The lamp had burnt dim, and the little room was cold.

Presently she slipped her hand into the white bodice she wore. A letter lay there, and her fingers caressed it. "I don't know whether I love him or not—perhaps I do, and perhaps I don't. I don't know whether I believe Uncle Richard—or this letter. But—I'm going to find out! I'm not going to be stopped from finding out."

And as she lay there, she was conscious of bonds she was half determined to escape, half willing to bear; of a fluttering excitement and dread. Step by step, and with a childish bravado, she had come within the influences of sex; and her fate was upon her.



CHAPTER XVIII

Meanwhile, amid this sensitive intermingling of the thoughts and feelings of women, there arose the sudden tumult and scandal of the new elements which had thrust themselves into what was already known to the religious world throughout England as "the Meynell case." During November and December that case came to include two wholly different things: the ecclesiastical suit in the Court of Arches, which, owing to a series of delays and to the illness of the Dean of the Court, was not to be heard in all probability before February, and the personal charges brought against the incumbent of Upcote Minor.

These fresh charges were formally launched by Henry Barron, the chief promoter also, as we know, of the ecclesiastical suit, in a letter written by him to Bishop Craye, on the very night when Alice Puttenham revealed her secret to Catharine Elsmere. But before we trace the effect of the letter, let us look for a moment at the general position of the Movement when this second phase of Meynell's connection with it began.

At that time the pending suits against the Modernist leaders—for there were now five instituted by different bishops, as test cases, in different parts of England—were already the subject of the keenest expectation and debate not only in church circles, but amid sections of the nation which generally trouble themselves very little about clerical or religious disputes. New births of time were felt to be involved in the legal struggle; passionate hopes and equally passionate fears hung upon it. There were old men in quiet country parsonages who, when they read the Modernist and followed the accounts of the Movement, were inclined to say to themselves with secret joy and humility that other men were entering into their labours, and the fields were at last whitening to harvest; while others, like Newman of old, had "fierce thoughts toward the Liberals," talked and spoke of Meynell and the whole band of Modernist clergy as traitors with whom no parley could be kept, and were ready to break up the Church at twenty-four hours' notice rather than sit down at the same table of the Lord with heretics and Socinians.

Between these two groups of men, each equally confident and clear, though by no means equally talkative, there was a middle region that contained many anxious minds and some of the wisest heads in England. If, at the time of Norham's visit to Maudeley, Bishop Craye of Markborough, and many other bishops with him, were still certain that the Movement would be promptly and easily put down, so far at least as its organic effect on the Church of England was concerned, yet, as November and December wore on, anxieties deepened, and confidence began to waver. The passion of the Movement was beginning to run through England, as it seemed to many, like the flame of an explosion through a dusty mine. What amazed and terrified the bishops was the revelation of pent-up energies, rebellions, ideals, not only among their own flocks, but in quarters, and among men and women, hitherto ruled out of religious affairs by general consent. They pondered the crowds which had begun to throng the Modernist churches, the extraordinary growth of the Modernist press, and the figures reported day by day as to the petition to be presented to Parliament in February. There was no orthodox person in authority who was not still determined on an unconditional victory; but it was admitted that the skies were darkening.

The effect of the Movement on the Dissenters—on that half of religious England which stands outside the National Church, where "grace" takes the place of authority, and bishops are held to be superfluities incompatible with the pure milk of the Word—was in many respects remarkable. The majority of the Wesleyan Methodists had thrown themselves strongly on to the side of the orthodox party in the Church; but among the Congregationalists and Presbyterians there was visible a great ferment of opinion and a great cleavage of sympathy; while, among the Primitive Methodists, a body founded on the straitest tenets of Bible worship, yet interwoven, none the less, with the working class life of England and Wales, and bringing day by day the majesty and power of religion to bear upon the acts and consciences of plain, poor, struggling men, there was visible a strong and definite current of acquiescence in Modernist ideas, which was inexplicable, till one came to know that among Meynell's friends at Upcote there were two or three Primitive local preachers who had caught fire from him, were now active members of his Church Council, and ardent though persecuted missionaries to their own body.

Meanwhile the Unitarians—small and gallant band!—were like persons standing on tiptoe before an opening glory. In their isolated and often mistaken struggle they had felt themselves for generations stricken with chill and barrenness; their blood now began to feel the glow of new kinships, the passion of large horizons. So, along the banks of some slender and much hindered stream, there come blown from the nearing sea prophetic scents and murmurs, and one may dream that the pent water knows at last the whence and whither of its life.

But the strangest spectacle of all perhaps was presented by the orthodox camp. For, in proportion as the Modernist attack developed, was the revival of faith among those hostile to it, or unready for it. For the first time in their lives, religion became interesting—thrilling even—to thousands of persons for whom it had long lost all real savour. Fierce question and answer, the hot cut and thrust of argument, the passion of honest fight on equal terms—without these things, surely, there has been no religious epoch, of any importance, in man's history. English orthodoxy was at last vitally attacked; and it began to show a new life, and express itself in a new language. These were times when men on all sides felt that stretching and straining of faculty which ushers in the days of spiritual or poetic creation; times when the most confident Modernist of them all knew well that he, no more than any one else, could make any guess worth having as to the ultimate future.

Of all this rapid and amazing development the personality and the writings of Richard Meynell had in few months become the chief popular symbol. There were some who thought that he was likely to take much the same place in the Modernist Movement of the twentieth century as Newman had taken in the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth; and men were beginning to look for the weekly article in the Modernist with the same emotion of a passionate hero-worship on the one hand, and of angry repulsion on the other, with which the Oxford of the thirties had been wont to look for each succeeding "Tract," or for Newman's weekly sermon at St. Mary's. To Newman's high subtleties of brain, to Newman's magic of style, Richard Meynell could not pretend. But he had two advantages over the great leader of the past: he was the disciple of a new learning which was inaccessible to Newman; and he was on fire with social compassions and enthusiasms to which Newman, the great Newman, was always pathetically a stranger. In these two respects Meynell was the representative of his own generation; while the influences flowing from his personal character and life were such that thousands who had never seen him loved and trusted him wholly. Men who had again and again watched great causes break down for want of the incommunicable something which humanity exacts from its leaders felt with a quiet and confident gladness that in Meynell they had got the man they wanted, the efficacious, indispensable man.

And now—suddenly—incredible things began to be said. It was actually maintained that the leader round whom such feelings had gathered had been, since his ordination, the betrayer of a young and innocent girl, belonging to a well-known family; that although it had been in his power for twenty years to marry the lady he had wronged, he had never attempted to do so, but had rather, during all that time, actively connived at the fraud by which his illegitimate child had passed as the daughter of Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton; while over the whole period he had kept up relations—and who knew of what character?—with the child's mother, an inhabitant of the very village where he himself was Rector.

Presently—it was added that Mr. Henry Barron, of Upcote Minor, one of the prosecutors in the ecclesiastical suit, had obtained unexpected and startling confirmation of these extraordinary facts from the confession of a woman who had been present at the birth of the child and had identified the Rector of Upcote as the father. Then, very soon, paragraphs of a veiled sort began to appear in some of the less responsible newspapers. The circulation of the anonymous letters began to be known; and the reader of a Modernist essay at an Oxford meeting caused universal consternation by telling an indiscreet friend, who presently spread it abroad, that Barron had already written to the Bishop of Markborough, placing in his hands a mass of supporting evidence relating to "this most lamentable business."

At first Meynell's friends throughout the country regarded these rumours as a mere device of the evil one. Similar things they said, and with truth, are constantly charged against heretics who cannot be put down. Slander is the first weapon of religious hatred. Meynell, they triumphantly answered, will put the anonymous letters in the hands of the police, and proceed against Henry Barron. And they who have taken up such a weapon shall but perish by it themselves the sooner.

But the weeks passed on. Not only were no proceedings taken, or, apparently, in prospect, by Meynell against his accusers; not only did the anonymous letters reappear from time to time, untracked and unpunished, but reports of a meeting held at Upcote itself began to spread—a meeting where Meynell had been definitely and publicly challenged by Barron to take action for the vindication of his character, and had definitely and publicly refused.

The world of a narrow and embittered orthodoxy began to breathe again; and there was black depression in the Modernist camp.

Let us, however, go back a little.

Barron's letter to the Bishop was the first shot in the direct and responsible attack. It consisted of six or seven closely written sheets, and agreed in substance with four or five others from the same hand, addressed at the same moment to the chief heads of the Orthodox party.

The Bishop received it at breakfast, just after he had concluded a hot political argument with his little granddaughter Barbara.

"All Tories are wicked," said Barbara, who had a Radical father, "except grandpapa, and he, mummy says, is weally a Riberal."

With which she had leaped into the arms of her nurse, and was carried off gurgling, while the Bishop threatened her from afar.

Then, with a sigh of impatience, as he recognized the signature on the envelope, he resigned himself to Barron's letter. When he had done it, sitting by the table in his library, he threw it from him with indignation, called for his coat, and hurried across his garden to the Cathedral for matins. After service, as with a troubled countenance he was emerging from the transept door, he saw Dornal in the Close and beckoned to him.

"Come into the library for ten minutes. I very much want to speak to you."

The Bishop led the way, and as soon as the door was shut he turned eagerly on his companion:

"Do you know anything of these abominable stories that are being spread about Richard Meynell?"

Dornal looked at him sadly.

"They are all over Markborough—and there is actually a copy of one of the anonymous letters—with dashes for the names—in the Post to-day?"

"I never hear these things!" said the Bishop, with an impatience which was meant, half for a scandal-mongering world, and half for himself. "But Barron has written me a perfectly incredible letter to-day. He seems to be the head and front of the whole business. I don't like Barron, and I don't like his letters!"

And throwing one slender leg over the other, while the tips of his long fingers met in a characteristic gesture, the little Bishop stared into the fire before him with an expression of mingled trouble and disgust.

Dornal, clearly, was no less unhappy. Drawing his chair close to the Bishop's he described the manner in which the story had reached himself. When he came to the curious facts concerning the diffusion and variety of the anonymous letters, the Bishop interrupted him:

"And Barron tells me he knows nothing of these letters!"

"So I hear also."

"But, my dear Dornal, if he doesn't, it makes the thing inexplicable! Here we have a woman who comes home dying, and sees one person only—Henry Barron—to whom she tells her story."

The Bishop went through the points of Barron's narrative, and concluded:

"Then, on the top of this, after her death—her son denying all knowledge of his mother's history—comes this crop of extraordinary letters, showing, you tell me, an intimate acquaintance with the neighbourhood and the parties concerned. And yet Barron—the only person Mrs. Sabin saw—knows nothing of them! They are a mystery to him. But, my dear Dornal, how can they be?" The Bishop faced round with energy on his companion. "He must at least have talked incautiously before some one!"

Dornal agreed, but could put forward no suggestion of his own. He sat drooping by the Bishop's fire, his aspect expressing the deep distress he did not shape in words. That very distress, however, was what made his company so congenial to the much perturbed Bishop, who felt, moreover, a warmer affection for Dornal than for any other member of his Chapter.

The Bishop resumed:

"Meanwhile, not a word from Meynell himself! That I confess wounds me." He sighed. "However, I suppose he regards our old confidential relations as broken off. To me—until the law has spoken—he is always one of my 'clergy'"—the Bishop's voice showed emotion—"and he would get my fatherly help just as freely as ever, if he chose to ask for it. But I don't know whether to send for him. I don't think I can send for him. The fact is—one feels the whole thing an outrage!"

Dornal looked up.

"That's the word!" he said gratefully. Then he added—hesitating—"I ought perhaps to tell you that I have written to Meynell—I wrote when the first report of the thing reached me. And I am sure that he can have no possible objection to my showing you his reply!" He put his hand into his pocket.

"By all means, my dear Dornal!" cried the Bishop with a brightening countenance. "We are both his friends, in spite of all that has happened and may happen. By all means, show me the letter."

Dornal handed it over. It ran as follows:

"MY DEAR DORNAL: It was like you to write to me, and with such kindness and delicacy. But even to you I can only say what I say to other questioners of a very different sort. The story to which you refer is untrue. But owing to peculiar circumstances it is impossible for me to defend myself in the ordinary way, and my lips are sealed with regard to it. I stand upon my character as known to my neighbours and the diocese for nearly twenty years. If that is not enough, I cannot help it.

"Thank you always for the goodness and gentleness of your letter. I wish with all my heart I could give you more satisfaction."

The two men looked at each other, the same conjectures passing through both minds.

"I hear the Fox-Wiltons and Miss Puttenham have all gone abroad," said the Bishop thoughtfully. "Poor things! I begin to see a glimmer. It seems to me that Meynell has been the repository of some story he feels he cannot honourably divulge. And then you tell me the letters show the handiwork of some one intimately acquainted with the local circumstances, who seems to have watched Meynell's daily life. It is of course possible that he may have been imprudent with regard to this poor lady. Let us assume that he knew her story and advised her. He may not have been sufficiently careful. Further, there is that striking and unfortunate likeness of which Barron of course makes the most. I noticed it myself, on an evening when I happened, at Maudeley, to see that handsome girl and Meynell in the same room. It is difficult to say in what it consists, but it must occur to many people who see them together."

There was silence a moment. Then Dornal said:

"How will it all affect the trial?"

"In the Court of Arches? Technically of course—not at all. But it will make all the difference to the atmosphere in which it is conducted. One can imagine how certain persons are already gloating over it—what use they will make of it—how they will magnify and embroider everything. And such an odious story! It is the degradation of a great issue!"

The little Bishop frowned. As he sat there in the dignity of his great library, so scrupulously refined and correct in every detail of dress, yet without a touch of foppery, the gleam of the cross on his breast answering the silver of the hair and the frank purity of the eyes, it was evident that he felt a passionate impatience—half moral, half esthetic—toward these new elements of the Meynell case. It was the fastidious impatience of a man for whom personal gossip and scandal ranked among the forbidden indulgences of life. "Things, not persons!" had been the time-honoured rule for conversation at the Palace table—persons, that is, of the present day. In those happy persons who had already passed into biography and history, in their peccadilloes no less than their virtues, the Bishop's interest was boundless. The distinction tended to make him a little super- or infra-human; but it enhanced the fragrance and delicacy of his personality.

Dornal was no less free from any stain of mean or scandalous gossip than the Bishop, but his knowledge of the human heart was far deeper, his sympathy far more intimate. It was not only that he scorned the slander, but, hour by hour, he seemed to walk in the same cloud with Meynell.

After some further discussion, the Bishop took up Barron's letter again. "I see there is likely to be a most painful scene at the Church Council meeting—which of course will be also one of their campaign meetings—the day after to-morrow. Barron declares that he means to challenge Meynell publicly to vindicate his character. Can I do anything?"

Dornal did not see anything could be done. The parish was already in open rebellion.

"It is a miserable, miserable business!" said the Bishop unhappily. "How can I get a report of the meeting—from some one else than Barron?"

"Mr. Flaxman is sure to be there?"

"Ah!—get him to write to me?"

"And you, my lord—will send for Meynell?"

"I think"—said the Bishop, with returning soreness—"that as he has neither written to me, nor consulted me, I will wait a little. We must watch—we must watch. Meanwhile, my dear fellow!"—he laid his hand on Dornal's shoulder—"let us think how to stop the talk! It will spoil everything. Those who are fighting with us must understand there are weapons we cannot stoop to use!"

* * * * *

As Dornal left the Palace, on his way past the Cathedral, he met young Fenton, the High Churchman who some months earlier had refused to recognize Meynell after the first Modernist meeting in Markborough. Fenton was walking slowly and reading the local newspaper—the same which contained the anonymous letter. His thin, finely modelled face, which in a few years would resemble the Houdon statue of St. Bruno, expressed an eager excitement that was not unlike jubilation. Dornal was practically certain that he was reading the paragraph that concerned Meynell, and certain also that it gave him pleasure. He hurriedly passed over to the other side of the street, that Fenton might not accost him.

Afterward, he spent the evening, partly in writing urgently in Meynell's defence to certain of his own personal friends in the diocese, and partly in composing an anti-Modernist address, full of a sincere and earnest eloquence, to be delivered the following week at a meeting of the Church party in Cambridge.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Cyril Fenton had also spent the evening in writing. He kept an elaborate journal of his own spiritual state; or rather he had begun to keep it about six months before this date, at the moment when the emergence of the Modernist Movement had detached him from his nascent friendship with Meynell, and had thrown him back, terrified, on a more resolute opposition than ever to the novelties and presumptions of free inquiry. The danger of reading anything, unawares, that might cause him even a moment's uneasiness had led to his gradually cutting himself off entirely from modern newspapers and modern books, in which, indeed, he had never taken any very compelling interest. His table was covered by various English and French editions of the Fathers—of St. Cyprian in particular, for whom he had a cult. On the bare walls of his study were various pictures of saints, a statuette of the Virgin, and another of St. Joseph, both of them feebly elegant in the Munich manner. Through his own fresh youthfulness, once so winning and wholesome, something pinched and cloistered had begun to thrust itself. His natural sweetness of temper was rapidly becoming sinful in his own eyes, his natural love of life also, and its harmless, even its ideal, pleasures.

It was a bitter winter day, and he had not allowed himself a greatcoat. In consequence he felt depressed and chilled; yet he could not make up his mind to go to bed earlier than usual, lest he should be thereby pampering the flesh. He was thoroughly dissatisfied with his own spiritual condition during the day, and had just made ample confession thereof in the pages of his diary. A few entries from that document will show the tone of a mind morbid for lack of exercise:

"D. came to see me this morning. We discussed war a good deal. In general, of course, I am opposed to war, but when I think of this ghastly plague of heresy which is sweeping away so many souls at the present moment, I feel sometimes that the only war into which I could enter with spirit would be a civil war.... In a great deal of my talk with D. I posed abominably. I talked of shooting and yachting as though I knew all about them. I can't be content that people should think me 'out' of anything, or a dull fool. It was the same with my talk to S. about church music. I talked most arrogantly; and in reality I know hardly anything about it.

"As to my vow of simplicity in food, I must keep my attention more on the alert. Yet to-day I have not done so badly; some cold ends of herring at breakfast, and a morsel of mackerel at lunch are the only things I have to reproach myself with; the only lapses from the strict rule of simplicity. But the quantity was deplorable—no moderation—not even a real attempt at it. Whenever I am disgusted with myself for having eaten too much at dinner, I constantly fail to draw the proper inference—that I should eat less at tea....

"I feel that this scandal about poor Meynell is probably providential. It must and will weaken the Modernist party enormously. To thank God for such a thing sounds horrible, but after all, have we any right to be more squeamish than Holy Writ? 'Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered.' The warnings and menaces of what are called the Imprecatory Psalms show us plainly that His enemies must be ours."

He closed his book, and came to shiver over the very inadequate fire which was all he allowed himself. Every shilling that he could put aside was being saved in order to provide his church with a new set of altar furniture. The congregation of the church was indeed fast ebbing away, and his heart was full of bitterness on the subject. But how could a true priest abate any fraction of either his Church principles, or his sound doctrine, to appease persons who were not and could not be judges of what was necessary to their own spiritual health?

As he warmed his thin hands, his bodily discomfort increased his religious despondency. Then, of a sudden, his eyes fell upon the portrait of a child standing on the mantelpiece—his sister's child, aged four. The cloud on the still boyish brow lightened at once.

"Tommy's birthday to-morrow," he said to himself. "Jolly little chap! Must write to him. Here goes!"

And reaching out his hand for his writing-case he wrote eagerly, a letter all fun and baby-talk, and fantastic drawings, in the course of which Tommy grew up, developed moustaches, and became a British Grenadier.

When he had finished it and put it up, he lay back laughing to himself, a different being.

But the gleam was only momentary. A recurring sense of chill and physical oppression dispersed it. Presently he rose heavily, glanced at his open diary, reread the last page with a sigh, and closed it. Then, as it was nearly midnight, he retreated upstairs to his bare and icy bedroom, where half-an-hour's attempt to meditate completed the numbness of body and mind, in which state ultimately he went to bed, though not to sleep.

* * * * *

The meeting of the Church Council of Upcote was held in the Church House of the village a few days after the Bishop's conversation with Canon Dornal. It was an evening long remembered by those who shared in it. The figure of Meynell instinct with a kind of fierce patience; the face rugged as ever, but paler and tenderer in repose, as of one who, mystically sustained, had been passing through deep waters; his speech, sternly repressed, and yet for the understanding ear, enriched by new tones and shades of feeling—on those who believed in him the effect of these slight but significant changes in the man they loved was electrical.

And five-sixths of those present believed in him, loved him, and were hotly indignant at the scandals which had arisen. They were, some of them, the elite of the mining population, men whom he had known and taught from childhood; there were many officials from the surrounding collieries; there was a miners' agent, who was also one of the well-known local preachers of the district; there were half a dozen women—the schoolmistress, the wife of the manager of the cooeperative store, and three or four wives of colliers—women to whom other women in childbirth, or the girl who had gone astray, or the motherless child, might appeal without rebuff, who were in fact the Rector's agents in any humanizing effort.

All these persons had come to the meeting eagerly expecting to hear from the Rector's own lips the steps he proposed to take for the putting down of the slanders circulating in the diocese, and the punishment of their authors. In the rear of the Council—who had been themselves elected by the whole parish—there were two or three rows of seats occupied by other inhabitants of the village, who made an audience. In the front row sat the strange spinster, Miss Nairn, a thin, sharp nosed woman of fifty, in rusty black clothes, holding her head high; not far from her the dubious publican who had been Maurice Barron's companion on a certain walk some days before. There too were Hugh and Rose Flaxman. And just as the proceedings were about to begin, Henry Barron opened the heavy door, hat in hand, came in with a firm step, and took a seat at the back, while a thrill of excitement went through the room.

It was an ancient room, near the church, and built like it, of red sandstone. It had been once the tiny grammar school of the village. Meynell had restored and adapted it, keeping still its old features—the low ceiling heavily beamed with oak, and the row of desks inscribed with the scholars' names of three centuries. Against the background of its white walls he stood thrown out in strong relief by the oil lamp on the table in front of him, his eyes travelling over the rows of familiar faces.

He spoke first of the new Liturgy of which copies had been placed on the seats. He reminded them they were all—or nearly all—comrades with him in the great Modernist venture; that they had given him the help of their approval and support at every step, and were now rebels with him against the authorities of the day. He pointed to his approaching trial, and the probability—nay the certainty—of his deprivation. He asked them to be steadfast with him, and he dwelt on the amazing spread of the Movement, the immense responsibility resting upon its first leaders and disciples, and the need for gentleness and charity. The room was hushed in silence.

Next, he proceeded to put the adoption of the new Liturgy to the vote. Suddenly Barron rose from his seat at the back. Meynell paused. The audience looked in suppressed excitement from one to the other.

"I regret," said the Rector, courteously, "that we cannot hear Mr. Barron at this moment. He is not a member of the Church Council. When the proceedings of the Council are over, this will become an open meeting, and Mr. Barron will then of course say what he wishes to say."

Barron hesitated a moment; then sat down.

The revised Liturgy was adopted by twenty-eight votes to two. One of the two dissentients was Dawes, the colliery manager, a sincere and consistent evangelical of the Simeon School, who made a short speech in support of his vote, dwelling in a voice which shook on the troubles coming on the parish.

"We may get another Rector," he said as he sat down. "We shall never get another Richard Meynell." A deep murmur of acquiescence ran through the room.

Meynell rose again from his seat.

"Our business is over. We now become an open meeting. Mr. Barron, I believe, wishes to speak."

The room was, at this point, densely crowded and every face turned toward the tall and portly form rising from the back. In the flickering lamplight it could be seen that the face usually so ruddy and full was blanched by determination and passion.

"My friends and neighbours!" said Barron, "it is with sorrow and grief that I rise to say the few words that I intend to say. On the audacity and illegality of what you have just done I shall say nothing. Argument, I know, would be useless. But this I have come to say: You have just been led—misled—into an act of heresy and rebellion by the man who should be your pastor in the Faith, who is responsible to God for your souls. Why have you been misled?—why do you follow him?" He flung out his hand toward Meynell.

"Because you admire and respect him—because you believe him a good man—a man of honest and pure life. And I am here to tell you, or rather to remind you, for indeed you all know it—that your Rector lies at this moment under a painful and disgraceful charge; that this charge has been circulated—in a discreditable way—a way for which I have no defence and of which I know nothing—throughout this diocese, and indeed throughout England; that your fair fame, as well as his are concerned; and, nevertheless, he refuses to take the only steps which can clear his character, and repay you for the devotion you have shown him! I call upon you, sir!"—the speaker bent forward, pointing impressively to the chairman of the meeting and emphasizing every word—"to take those steps at once! They are open to you at any moment. Take them against myself! I have given, I will give, you every opportunity. But till that is done do not continue, in the face of the congregation you have deceived and led astray, to assume the tone of hypocritical authority in which you have just spoken! You have no moral right to any authority among us; you never had any such right; and in Christian eyes your infidel teaching has led to its natural results. At any rate, I trust that now, at last, even these your friends and dupes will see the absolute necessity, before many weeks are over, of either forcing you to resign your living, or forcing you to take the only means open to honest men of protecting their character!"

He resumed his seat. The audience sat petrified a moment. Then Hugh Flaxman sprang to his feet, and two or three others, the local preacher among them. But Meynell had also risen.

"Please, Mr. Flaxman—my friends—!"

He waved a quiet hand toward those who had risen, and they unwillingly gave way. Then the Rector looked round the room for a few silent instants. He was very white, but when he spoke it was with complete composure.

"I expected something of this kind to happen, and whether it had happened or no I should have spoken to you on this matter before we separated. I know—you all know—to what Mr. Barron refers—that he is speaking of the anonymous letters concerning myself and others which have been circulated in this neighbourhood. He calls upon me, I understand, to take legal action with regard both to them and to the reports which he has himself circulated, by word of mouth, and probably by letter. Now I want you plainly to understand"—he bent forward, his hands on the table before him, each word clear and resonant—"that I shall take no such action! My reasons I shall not give you. I stand upon my life among you and my character among you all these years. This only I will say to you, my friends and my parishioners: The abominable story told in these letters—the story which Mr. Barron believes, or tries to make himself believe—is untrue. But I will say no more than that—to you, or any one else. And if you are to make legal action on my part a test of whether you will continue to follow me religiously—to accept me as your leader, or no—then my friends, we must part! You must go your way, and I must go mine. There will be still work for me to do; and God knows our hearts—yours and mine."

He paused, looking intently into the lines of blanched faces before him. Then he added:

"You may wish to discuss this matter. I recognize it as natural you should wish to discuss it. But I shall not discuss it with you. I shall withdraw. Mr. Dawes—will you take the chair?"

He beckoned to the colliery manager, who automatically obeyed him. The room broke into a hubbub, men and women pressing round Meynell as he made his way to the door. But he put them aside, gently and cheerfully.

"Decide it for yourselves!" he said with his familiar smile. "It is your right."

And in another moment, the door had opened and shut, and he was gone.

* * * * *

He had no sooner disappeared than a tumultuous scene developed in the Church room.

Beswick, the sub-agent and local preacher, a sandy-haired, spectacled, and powerfully built man, sprang on to the platform, to the right hand of Dawes, and at last secured silence by a passionate speech in defence of Meynell and in denunciation of the men who in order to ruin him ecclesiastically were spreading these vile tales about him "and a poor lady that has done many a good turn to the folk of this village, and nothing said about it too!"

"Don't you, sir"—he said, addressing Barron with a threatening finger—"don't you come here, telling us what to think about the man we've known for twenty years in this parish! The people that don't know Richard Meynell may believe these things if they please—it'll be the worse for them! But we've seen this man comforting and uplifting our old people in their last hours—we've seen him teaching our children—and giving just a kind funny word now an' again to keep a boy or a girl straight—aye, an' he did it too—they knew he had his eye on 'em! We've seen him go down these pits, when only a handful would risk their lives with him, to help them as was perhaps past hope. We've seen him skin himself to the bone that other men might have plenty—we've heard him Sunday after Sunday. We know him!" The speaker brought one massive hand down on the other with an emphasis that shook the room. "Don't you go talking to us! If Richard Meynell won't go to law with you and the likes of you, sir, he's got his reasons, and his good ones, I'll be bound. And don't you, my friends"—he turned to the room—"don't you be turned back from this furrow you've begun to plough. You stick to your man! If you don't, you're fools, aye, and ungrateful fools too! You know well enough that Albert Beswick isn't a parson's man! You know that I don't hold with Mr. Meynell in many of his views. There's his views about 'election,' and the like o' that—quite wrong, in my 'umble opinion. But what does that matter? You know that I never set foot in Upcote Church till three years ago—that bishops and ceremonies are nought to me—that I came to God, as many of you did, by the Bible class and the penitent form. But I declare to you that Richard Meynell, and the men with him, are out for a big thing! They're out for breaking down barriers and letting in light. They're out for bringing Christian men together and letting them worship freely in the old churches that our fathers built. They're out for giving men and women new thoughts about God and Christ, and for letting them put them into new words, if they want to. Well, I say again, it's a big thing! And Satan's out, too, for stopping it! Don't you make any mistake about it! This bad business—of these libels that are about—is one of the obstacles in our race he'll trip us up on, if he can. Now I put it to you—let us clear it out o' the way this very night, as far as we're concerned! Let us send the Rector such a vote of confidence from this meeting as'll show him fast enough where he stands in Upcote—aye, and show others too! And as for these vile letters that are going round—I'd give my right hand to know the man who wrote them!—and the story that you, sir"—he pointed again to Barron—"say you took from poor Judith Sabin when her mind was clouded and she near her end—why, it's base minds that harbour base thoughts about their betters! He shall be no friend of mine—that I know—that spreads these tales. Friends and neighbours, let us keep our tongues from them—and our children's tongues! Let us show that we can trust a man that deserves our trust. Let us stand by a good man that's stood by us; and let us pray God to show the right!"

The greater part of the audience, sincerely moved, rose to their feet and cheered. Barron endeavoured to reply, but was scarcely listened to. The publican East sat twirling his hat in his hands, sarcastic smiles going out and in upon his fat cheeks, his furtive eyes every now and then consulting the tall spinster who sat beside him, grimly immovable, her spectacled eyes fixed apparently on the lamp above the platform.

Flaxman wished to speak, but was deterred by the reflection that as a newcomer in the district he had scarcely a valid right to interfere. He and Rose stayed till the vote of confidence had been passed by a large majority—though not so large as that which had accepted the new Liturgy—after which they drove home rather depressed and ill at ease. For in truth the plague of anonymous letters was rather increasing than abating. Flaxman had had news that day of the arrival of two more among their own country-house acquaintance of the neighbourhood. He sat down, in obedience to a letter from Dornal, to write a doleful report of the meeting to the Bishop.

* * * * *

Meynell received the vote of confidence very calmly, and wrote a short note of thanks to Beswick. Then for some weeks, while the discussion of his case in its various aspects, old and new, ran raging through England, he went about his work as usual, calm in the centre of the whirlwind, though the earth he trod seemed to him very often a strange one. He prepared his defence for the Court of Arches; he wrote for the Modernist; and he gave as much mind as he could possibly spare to the unravelling of Philip Meryon's history.

In this matter, however, he made but very slow and disappointing progress. He became more and more convinced, and his solicitor with him, that there had been a Scotch marriage some eighteen months before this date between Meryon and the sister of a farmer in the Lothians, with whom he had come in contact during a fishing tenancy. But what appeared in the course of investigation was that the woman concerned and all her kindred were now just as anxious—aided by the ambiguities of the Scotch marriage law—to cover up and conceal the affair as was Meryon himself. She could not be got to put forward any claim; her family would say nothing; and the few witnesses hitherto available were tending to disappear. No doubt Philip was at work corrupting them; and the supposed wife was evidently quite willing, if not eager, to abet him.

Every week he heard from Mary, letters which, written within bounds fully understood by them both and never transgressed, revealed to him the tremulous tenderness and purity of the heart he knew—though he would not confess it to himself—he had conquered. These letters became to him the stay of life, the manna which fed him, the water of healing and strength. It was evident that, according to his wish, she did not know and was determined not to know the details of his struggle; and nothing helped him more than the absolute trust of her ignorance.

He heard also constantly from Alice Puttenham. She, too, poor soul—but how differently!—was protecting herself as best she could from an odious knowledge.

"Edith writes to me, full of terrible things that are being said in England; but as I can do nothing, and must do nothing according to you, I do not read her letters. She sends me a local newspaper sometimes, scored with her marks and signs that are like shrieks of horror, and I put it in the fire. What I suffer I will keep to myself. Perhaps the worst part of every day comes when I take Hester out and amuse her in this gay Paris. She is so passionately vital herself, and one dreads to fail her in spirits or buoyancy.

"She is very well and wonderfully beautiful; at present she is having lessons in dancing and elocution, and turning the heads of her teachers. It is amusing—or would be amusing, to any one else than me—to see how the quiet family she is with clucks after her in perpetual anxiety, and how cavalierly she treats them. I think she is fairly happy; she never mentions Meryon's name; but I often have a strange sense that she is looking for some one—expects some one. When we turn into a new street, or a new alley of the Bois, I have sometimes seemed to catch a wild listening in her face. I live only for her—and I cannot feel that it matters to her in the least whether I do or not. Perhaps, some day. Meanwhile you may be sure I think of nothing else. She knows nothing of what is going on in England—and she says she adores Paris."