Mrs. Humphry Ward

“ 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. ”

“ And Elsmere's wife?—that rigid, pathetic figure, who, before he knew her in the flesh, had been to him, through the reports of many friends, a kind of legendary presence—the embodiment of the Old Faith. Meynell only knew that as far as he was concerned something had happened—something which he could not define. She was no longer his enemy; and he blessed her humbly in his heart. He thought also, with a curious thankfulness, of her strong and immovable convictions. Each thinking mind, as it were, carries within it its own Pageant of the Universe, and lights the show with its own passion. ”

“ And Mary?—who was eight years older—older! than this girl of eighteen who sat there, sickened by life, conscious of a dead wall of catastrophe drawn between her and the future.
Should she go to them? Should she open their door and say—"Here I am!—Horrible things have happened. No decent person will ever know me or speak to me again. But you said—you'd help me—if I wanted it. Perhaps it was a lie—like all the rest?"
Then as the reddened eyelids fell with sheer fatigue, there rose on the inward sight the vision of Catharine Elsmere's face—its purity, its calm, its motherliness. ”

“ Every one knows the truth now—every one who cares; and every one understands. But now—after the effort poor Alice has made—after all that she and you have suffered—you insist on turning fresh doubt and suspicion on yourself, your motives, your past history. Can't you see how people may gossip about it—how they may interpret it? You have no right to do it, my dear Richard!—no right whatever. Your 'good report' belongs not only to yourself—but—to Mary!"
Catharine's breath had quickened; her hand shook upon her knee. Meynell rose from his seat, paced the room and came back to her. ”

“ Round the head of the dale the curtain of cloud hung thicker, save where one superb crag tore it asunder, falling sheer into the green gentleness of the fields. In the silence, all the voices of nature spoke; the rising wind, which flung itself against the hill-slopes at their feet; the insistent flow of the river, descending from the reservoirs far away; and the sharp chatter of the little beck leaping at their side from stone to stone. Passionately, in Meynell's heart the "buried life" awoke, which only love can free from the cavern where it lies, and bring into the full energy of day. ”

“ The hymns rose and fell through the dim red sandstone church—symbol of the endless plaint of human life, forever clamouring in the ears of Time; and Meynell's address, as he stood on the chancel steps, almost among the people, the disfiguring strips of plaster on the temple and brow sharply evident between the curly black hair and the dark hollows of the eyes, sank deep into grief-stricken souls. It was the plain utterance of a man, with the prophetic gift, speaking to human beings to whom, through years of checkered life, he had given all that a man can give of service and of soul. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For the first time, since Hester's death, Meynell's sad face broke into joy. The glorious church appeared to him as the visible attestation of the Divine creative life in men, flowing on endlessly, from the Past, through the Present, to the unknown Future.
From the distance came a sound of chanting. They walked slowly up the nave, conscious of a strange tumult in the pulse, as though the great building with its immemorial history were half lending itself to, half resisting, the emotion that filled them. In the choir a practice was going on. ”

“ Mary could not take her eyes from it. It betrayed an animation, a passion of life, which had been foreign to it for months. In these few crowded hours, when every word and action had been simple, instructive, inevitable; love to God and man working at their swiftest and purest; through all the tragedy and the horror some burden seemed to have dropped from Catharine's soul. She met her daughter's eyes, and smiled.
When Meynell had finished, the crowd silently drifted away, and he came back to the Elsmeres. They noticed the village fly coming toward them—saw it stop in the roadway. ”

“ Miss Puttenham tried to rise, but Hester, who was leaning against her knee, prevented it.
"Why is it different?" she said, audaciously. "You always say you—you—want to be everything to me—and then you hide things from me—and I—"
She raised herself, sitting upright on the floor, her hands round her knees, and spoke with extraordinary animation and sparkling eyes.
"Why, I should have loved you twice as much, Aunt Alice—and you know I do love you!—if you'd told me more about yourself. The people I care about are the people who live—and feel—and do things! ”

“ But to Meynell, poor Alice Puttenham poured out all the bitterness of her heart:
"It seems to me that the little hold I had over her, and the small affection she had for me when we arrived here, are both now less than they were. During the last week especially (the letter was dated the fourteenth of January) I have been at my wits' end how to amuse or please her. She resents being watched and managed more than ever. One feels there is a tumult in her soul to which we have no access. Her teachers complain of her temper and her caprice. And yet she dazzles and fascinates as much as ever. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ Nobody should trust this young man farther than they can see him."
"It musn't—it can't be allowed!" said Catharine, with energy. And, as she spoke, she seemed to feel again the soft bloom of Hester's young cheek against her own, just as when she had drawn the girl to her, in that instinctive caress. The deep maternity in Catharine had never yet found scope enough in the love of one child.
Then, with a still keener sense of the various difficulties rising along Meynell's path, Flaxman and Rose returned to the anxious discussion of Barron's move and how to meet it. ”

“ Hester furiously dashed away the tears she had not been able to stop.
Meynell's look changed. His voice grew strangely pitiful and soft.
"Dear Hester—if you knew—you couldn't be unkind to Aunt Alice."
"Why shouldn't I know? Why am I treated like a baby?"
"There are some things too bitter to tell,"—he said gravely—"some griefs we have no right to meddle with. But we can heal them—or make them worse. You"—his kind eyes scourged her again—"have been making everything worse for Aunt Alsie for a long time past." ”

“ There is no 'iron law' for life and will, beloved—they create, they are the masters, they are forever new. All the same!"—his tone changed—"I believe firmly that this rock knew from all eternity that you and I should sit here to-day!"
Presently, Mary disengaged herself. Her hat was not what it had been; her hair had escaped its bounds, and must be rigorously put to rights. She sat there flushed and bareheaded, her hands working; while Meynell's eyes devoured her.
"It is January, Richard, and the sun is sinking." ”

“ He felt certain that the inner life of such a personality as Mary Elsmere was rich and passionate. Sometimes, in these lonely hours, did she think of the man who had told her so much of himself on that, to him, memorable walk? Meynell looked back upon the intimate and autobiographical talk into which he had been led, with some wonder and a hot cheek. He had confessed himself partly to Elsmere's daughter, on a hint of sympathy, as to one entitled to such a confidence, so to speak, by inheritance, should she desire it; but still more—he owned it—to a delightful woman. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Then his tone changed—"Hester!—my child!—you can't be in love with that fellow—that false, common fellow!—you can't!"
Hester tightened her lips and would not answer. A rush of distress came over Meynell as he thought of her movement toward Philip in the garden. He gently resumed:
"Any day now might bring the true lover, Hester!—the man who would comfort you for all the past, and show you what joy really means. Be patient, dear Hester—be patient! If you wanted to punish us for not making you happy enough, well, you have done it! ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Mary's heart, as she was pushed and pressed onward, burnt the memory of Meynell on the steps—speaking, gesticulating—and the surging crowd in front of him.
There was that to do, however, which deadened fear. In the main street the procession was met by hurrying doctors and nurses. For those broken bodies indeed—young men in their prime—nothing could be done, save to straighten the poor limbs, to wash the coal dust from the strong faces, and cover all with the white linen of death. ”

“ And that—do you suppose Richard Meynell would ever do that?—to any poor human soul that had trusted him?"
The colour had rushed back into her cheeks; she held herself erect, transfigured by the emotion that possessed her. Catharine looked at her in doubt—trouble—amazement. And then, her pure sense divined something—dimly—of what the full history of this soul had been; and her heart melted. She put out her hands and drew the speaker down again into the seat beside her.
"I think you'll have to let him decide that for you. He's a strong man—and a wise man. He'll judge what's right. ”

“ Flaxman looked at her with an expression as confident as her own.
"To protect a woman, my dear Catharine—a man may say anything in the world—almost."
Catharine made no reply, but her quiet face showed she did not agree with him.
"That child Hester!" Rose emerged suddenly from a mental voyage of recollection and conjecture. "Now one understands why Lady Fox-Wilton—stupid woman!—has never seemed to care a rap for her. It must indeed be annoying to have to mother a child so much handsomer than your own."
"I think I am very sorry for Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton," said Catharine, after a moment. ”

“ 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? ”

“ And as she sat now following Meynell and Mary in thought along the valley, and now listening vaguely to the murmur of the fire or the stream outside, there came upon her a first gentle premonition—as though a whisper, from far away—of the solitude of death.
Lines from the Christian Year, the book on which her girlhood had been nourished, stole into her mind:
Why should we faint and fear to live alone,
Since all alone, so Heaven has willed, we die?
Never had sunshine seemed to Meynell so life-giving as this pale wintry warmth. The soft sound of Mary's dress beside him ”

“ 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. ”

“ Elsmere's attitude toward him. He had no idea what had caused it; but he felt it. And he realized also that through unseen and inexplicable gradations Mary had come mysteriously near to him. He dared not have spoken a word of love to her; but such feeling as theirs, however restrained, penetrates speech and gesture, and irresistibly makes all things new.
They spoke of the most trivial matters, and hardly noticed what they said. He all the time was thinking: "Beyond this tumult there will be rest some day—then I may speak. We could live hardly and simply—neither of us wants luxury. ”

“ There had sprung up in Mary's mind, indeed, a saeva indignatio, not for herself, but for Richard, first and foremost, and next for his cause. Dark as she knew Meynell's forebodings and beliefs to be, anxiety for Hester must sometimes be forgotten in a natural resentment for high aims thwarted, and a great movement risked, by the wicked folly of a girl of eighteen, on whom every affection and every care had been lavished.
"The roads will be impassable to-morrow," said Catharine, drawing aside the curtain, only to see a window already blocked with drifted snow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But there was a solemn kneeling by the Cross; a solemn opening of the mind to the cleansing and strengthening forces that flow from that life and death which are Christendom's central possession; the symbol through which, now understood in this way, now in that, the Eternal speaks to the Christian soul.
So, amid "the cheerful silence of the fells," a good man, heavily, took back his task. From this wreck of affection, this ruin of hope, he must go forth to preach love and hope to other men; from the depths of his grief and his defeat he must summon others to struggle and victory. ”