  The church clock of Upcote Minor was just striking nine o'clock as Richard Meynell, a few hours later than the conversation just recorded, shut the Rectory gate behind him, and took his way up the village. The night was cold and gusty. The summer this year had forgotten to be balmy, and Meynell, who was an ardent sun-lover, shivered as he walked along, buttoning a much-worn parson's coat against the sharp air. Before him lay the long, straggling street, with its cottages and small shops, its post-office, and public-houses, and its occasional gentlefolks' dwellings, now with a Georgian front plumb on the street, and now hidden behind walls and trees. It was evidently a large village, almost a country town, with a considerable variety of life. At this hour of the evening most of the houses were dark, for the labourers had gone to bed. But behind the drawn blinds of the little shops there were still lights here and there, and in the houses of the gentility. The Rector passed the fine perpendicular church standing back from the road, with its churchyard about it; and just beyond it, he turned, his pace involuntarily slackening, to look at a small gabled house, surrounded by a garden, and overhung by a splendid lime tree. Suddenly, as he approached it, the night burst into fragrance, for a gust of wind shook the lime-blossom, and flung the scent in Meynell's face; while at the same time the dim masses of roses in the garden sent out their sweetness to the passers-by. A feeling of pleasure, quick, involuntary, passed through his mind; pleasure in the thought of what these flowers meant to the owner of them. He had a vision of a tall and slender woman, no longer young, with a delicate and plaintive face, moving among the rose-beds she loved, her light dress trailing on the grass. The recollection stirred in him affection, and an impulse of sympathy, stronger than the mere thought of the flowers, and the woman's tending of them, could explain. It passed indeed immediately into something else—a touch of new and sharp anxiety. "And she's been very peaceful of late," he said to himself ruefully, "as far at least as Hester ever lets her be. Preston's wife was a godsend. Perhaps now she'll come out of her shell and go more among the people. It would help her. Anyway, we can't have everything rooted up again just yet—before the time." He walked on, and as the farther corner of the house came into view, he saw a thinly curtained window with a light inside it, and it seemed to him that he distinguished a figure within. "Reading?—or embroidering? Probably, at her work. She had that commission to finish. Busy woman!" He fell to imagining the little room, the embroidery frame, the books, and the brindled cat on the rug, of no particular race or beauty; for use not for show; but sensitive and gentle like its mistress, and like her, not to be readily made friends with. "How wise of her," he thought, "not to accept her sister's offer since He smiled sadly to himself, threw a last troubled look at the little house, and left it behind him. Before him, the village street, with its green and its pond, widened under the scudding sky. Far ahead, about a quarter of a mile away, among surrounding trees, certain outlines were visible through the July twilight. The accustomed eye knew them for the chimneys of the Fox-Wiltons' house, owned now, since the recent death of its master, Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton, by his widow, the sister of the lady with the cat and the embroidery, and mother of many children, for the most part an unattractive brood, peevish and slow-minded like their father. Hester was the bright, particular star in that house, as Stephen Barron had now found out. Alack!—alack! The Rector's face resumed for a moment the expression of painful or brooding perplexity it had worn during his conversation of the afternoon with young Barron, on the subject of Hester Fox-Wilton. Another light in a window—and a sound of shouting and singing. The "Cowroast," a "public" mostly frequented by the miners who inhabited the northern end of the village, was evidently doing trade. The Rector did not look up as he passed it; but in general he turned an indulgent eye upon it. Before entering upon the living, he had himself worked for a month as an ordinary miner, in the colliery whose tall chimneys could be seen to the east above the village roofs. His body still vividly retained the physical memory of those days—of the aching muscles, and the gargantuan thirsts. At last the rows of new-built cottages attached to the colliery came in view on the left; to the right, a steep hillside heavily wooded, and at the top of it, in the distance, the glimmering of a large white house—stately and separate—dominating the village, the church, the collieries, and the Fox-Wiltons' plantations. The Rector threw a glance at it. It was from that house had come the letter he had found on his hall-table that afternoon; a letter in a handwriting large and impressive like the dim house on the hill. The handwriting of a man accustomed to command, whether his own ancestral estate, or the collieries which had been carved out of its fringe, or the village spreading humbly at his feet, or the church into which he walked on Sunday with heavy tread, and upright carriage, conscious of his threefold dignity—as squire, magistrate, and churchwarden. "It's my business to fight him!" Meynell thought, looking at the house, and squaring his broad shoulders unconsciously. "It's not my business to hate him—not at all—rather to respect and sympathize with him. I provoke the fight—and I may be thankful to have lit on a strong antagonist. What's Stephen afraid of? What can they do? Let 'em try!" A smile—contemptuous and good-humoured—crossed the Rector's face. Any angry bigot determined to rid his parish of a heretical parson might no doubt be tempted to use other than legal and theological weapons, if he could get them. A heretic with unpaid bills and some hidden vice is scarcely in a position to make much of his heresy. But the Rector's smile showed him humorously conscious of an almost excessive innocence of private life. The thought of how little an enemy could find to lay hold on in his history or present existence seemed almost to bring with it a kind of shamefacedness—as for experience irrevocably foregone, warm, tumultuous, human experience, among the sinners and sufferers of the world. For there are odd, mingled moments in the lives of most scholars and saints—like Renan in his queer envy of ThÉophile Gautier—when such men inevitably ask themselves whether they have not missed something irreplaceable, the student, by his learning—the saint even, by his goodness. Here now was "Miners' Row." As the Rector approached the cottage of which he was in search the clouds lightened in the east, and a pale moonshine, suffusing the dusk, showed in the far distance beyond the village, the hills of Fitton Chase, rounded, heathy hills, crowned by giant firs. Meynell looked at them with longing, and a sudden realization of his own weariness. A day or two, perhaps a week or two, among the fells, with their winds and scents about him, and their streams in his ears—he must allow himself that, before the fight began. No. 8. A dim light showed in the upper window. The Rector knocked at the door. A woman opened—a young and sweet-looking nurse in her bonnet and long cloak. "You look pretty done!" exclaimed the Rector. "Has he been giving trouble?" "Oh, no, sir, not more than usual. It's the two of them." "She won't go to her sister's?" "She won't stir a foot, sir." "Where is she?" The nurse pointed to the living-room on her left. "She scarcely eats anything—a sup of tea sometimes. And I doubt whether she sleeps at all." "And she won't go to him?" "If he were dying, and she alone with him in the house, I don't believe she'd go near him." The Rector stepped in and asked a few questions as to arrangements for the night. The patient, it seemed, was asleep, in consequence of a morphia injection, and likely to remain so for an hour or two. He was dying of an internal injury inflicted by a fall of rock in the mine some ten days before. Surgery had done what it could, but signs of blood-poisoning had appeared, and the man's days were numbered. The doctor had left written instructions, which the nurse handed over to Meynell. If certain symptoms appeared, the doctor was to be summoned. But in all probability the man's fine constitution, injured though it had been by drink, would enable him to hold out another day or two. And the hideous pain of the first week had now ceased; mortification had almost certainly set in, and all that could be done was to wait the slow and sure failure of the heart. The nurse took leave. Meynell was hanging up his hat in the little passageway, when the door of the front parlour opened, after being unlocked. Meynell looked round. "Good evening, Mrs. Bateson. You are coming upstairs, I hope, with me?" He spoke gently, but with a quiet authority. The woman in the doorway shook her head. She was thin and narrow-chested. Her hair was already gray, though she could not have been more than thirty-five, and youth and comeliness had been long since battered from her face, partly by misery of mind, partly by direct ill usage of which there were evident traces. She looked steadily at the Rector. "I'm not going," she said. "He's nowt to me. But I'd like to know what the doctor was thinkin' of him." "The doctor thinks he may live through to-night and to-morrow night—not much more. He is your husband, Mrs. Bateson, and whatever you have against him, you'll be very sorry afterward if you don't give him help and comfort in his death. Come up now, I beg of you, and watch with me. He might die at any moment." And Meynell put out his hand kindly toward the woman standing in the shadow, as though to lead her. But she stepped backward. "I know what I'm about," she said, breathing quick. "He made a fule o' me wi' that wanton Lizzie Short, and he near killt me the last morning afore he went. And I'd been a good wife to him for fifteen year, and never a word between us till that huzzy came along. And she's got a child by him, and he must go and throw it in my face that I'd never given him one. And he struck and cursed me that last morning—he wished me dead, he said. And I sat and prayed God to punish him. An' He did. The roof came down on him. And now he mun die. I've done wi' him—and she's done wi' him. He's made his bed, and he mun lig on it." The Rector put up his hand sternly. "Don't! Mrs. Bateson. Those are words you'll repent when you yourself come to die. He has sinned toward you—but remember!—he's a young man still—in the prime of life. He has suffered horribly—and he has only a few hours or days to live. He has asked for you already to-day, he is sure to ask for you to-night. Forgive him!—ask God to help him to die in peace!" While he spoke she stood motionless, impassive. Meynell's voice had beautiful inflections, and he spoke with strong feeling. Few persons whom he so addressed could have remained unmoved. But Mrs. Bateson only retreated farther into the dreary little parlour, with its wool mats and antimacassars, and a tray of untasted tea on the table. She passed her tongue round her dry lips to moisten them before she spoke, quite calmly: "Thank you, sir. Thank you. You mean well. But we must all judge for ourselves. If there's anything you want I can get for you, you knock twice on the floor—I shall hear you. But I'm not comin' up." Meynell turned away discouraged, and went upstairs. In the room above lay the dying man—breathing quickly and shallowly under the influence of the drug that had been given him. The nurse had raised him on his pillows, and the window near him was open. His powerful chest was uncovered, and he seemed even in his sleep to be fighting for air. In the twelve hours that had elapsed since Meynell had last seen him he had travelled with terrible rapidity toward the end. He looked years older than in the morning; it was as though some sinister hand had been at work on the face, expanding here, contracting there, substituting chaos and nothingness for the living man. The Rector sat down beside him. The room was small and bare—a little strip of carpet on the boards, a few chairs, and a little table with food and nourishment beside the bed. On the mantelpiece was a large printed card containing the football fixtures of the winter before. Bateson had once been a fine player. Of late years, however, his interest had been confined to betting heavily on the various local and county matches, and it was to his ill-luck as a gambler no less than to the influence of the flimsy little woman who had led him astray that his moral break-up might be traced. A common tale!—yet more tragic than usual. For the bedroom contained other testimonies to the habits of a ruined man. There was a hanging bookcase on the wall, and the Rector sitting by the bed could just make out the titles of the books in the dim light. Mill, Huxley, a reprint of Tom Paine, various books by Blatchford, the sixpenny editions of "Literature and Dogma," and Renan's "Life of Christ," some popular science volumes of Browning and Ruskin, and a group of well-thumbed books on the birds of Mercia—the little collection, hardly earned, and, to judge from its appearance, diligently read, showed that its owner had been a man of intelligence. The Rector looked from it to the figure in the bed with a pang at his heart. All was still in the little cottage. Through the open window the Rector could see fold after fold of the Chase stretching north and west above the village. The moorland ridges shone clear under the moon, now bare, or scantily plumed by gaunt trees, and now clothed in a dense blackness of wood. Meynell, who knew every yard of the great heath and loved it well, felt himself lifted there in spirit as he looked. The "bunchberries" must just be ripening on the high ground—nestling scarlet and white amid their glossy leaves. And among them and beside them, the taller, slender bilberries, golden green; the exquisite grasses of the heath, pale pink, and silver, and purple, swaying in the winds, clothing acre after acre with a beauty beyond the looms of men; the purple heather and the ling flushing toward its bloom: and the free-limbed scattered birch trees, strongly scrawled against the sky. The scurry of the clouds over the purple sweeps of moor, the beat of the wind, and then suddenly, pools of fragrant air sun-steeped—he drew in the thought of it all, as he might have drunk the moorland breeze itself, with a thrill of pleasure, which passed at once into a movement of soul. "My God—my God!" No other words imagined or needed. Only a leap of the heart, natural, habitual, instinctive, from the imagined beauty of the heath, to the "Eternal Fountain" of all beauty. The hand of the dying man made a faint rustling with the sheet. Meynell, checked, rebuked almost, by the slight sound, bent his eyes again on the sleeper, and leaning forward tried to meditate and pray. But to-night he found it hard. He realized anew his physical and mental fatigue, and a certain confused clamour of thought, strangely persistent behind the more external experience alike of body and mind; like the murmur of a distant sea heard from far inland, as the bond and background of all lesser sounds. The phrases of the letter he had found on the hall-table recurred to him whether he would or no. They were mainly legal and technical, intimating that an application had been made to the Bishop of Markborough to issue a Commission of Inquiry into certain charges made by parishioners of Upcote Minor against the Rector of the parish. The writer of the letter was one of the applicants, and gave notice of his intention to prosecute the charges named, with the utmost vigour through all the stages prescribed by ecclesiastical law. But it was, rather, some earlier letters from the same hand—letters more familiar, intimate, and discursive—that ultimately held the Rector's thoughts as he kept his watch. For in those letters were contained almost all the objections that a sensitive mind and heart had had to grapple with before determining on the course to which the Rector of Upcote was now committed. They were the voice of the "adversary," the "accuser." Crude or conventional, as the form of the argument might be, it yet represented the "powers and principalities" to be reckoned with. If the Rector's conscience could not sustain him against it, he was henceforth a dishonest and unhappy man; and when his lawyers had failed to protect him against its practical result—as they must no doubt fail—he would be a dispossessed priest: "What discipline in life or what comfort in death can such a faith as yours bring to any human soul? Do, I beg of you, ask yourself this question. If the great miracles of the Creed are not true, what have you to give the wretched and the sinful? Ought you not in common human charity to make way for one who can offer the consolations, utter the warnings, or hold out the heavenly hopes from which you are debarred?" * * * * * The Rector fixed his gaze upon the sick man. It was as though the question of the letter were put to him through those parched lips. And as he looked, Bateson opened his eyes. "Be that you, Rector?" he said, in a clear voice. "I've been sitting up with you, Bateson. Can you take a little brandy and milk, do you think?" The patient submitted, and the Rector, with a tender and skilful touch, made him comfortable on his pillows and smoothed the bedclothes. "Where's my wife?" he said presently, looking round the room. "She's sleeping downstairs." "I want her to come up." "Better not ask her. She seems ill and tired." The sick man smiled—a slight and scornful smile. "She'll ha' time enough presently to be tired. You goa an' ask her." "I'd rather not leave you, Bateson. You're very ill." "Then take that stick then, an' rap on the floor. She'll hear tha fast enough." The Rector hesitated, but only for a moment. He took the stick and rapped. Almost immediately the sound of a turning key was heard through the small thinly built cottage. The door below opened and footsteps came up the stairs. But before they reached the landing the sound ceased. The two men listened in vain. "You goa an' tell her as I'm sorry I knocked her aboot," said Bateson, eagerly. "An' she can see for hersen as I can't aggravate her no more wi' the other woman." He raised himself on his elbow, staring into the Rector's face. "I'm done for—tell her that." "Shall I tell her also, that you love her?—and you want her love?" "Aye," said Bateson, nodding, with the same bright stare into Meynell's eyes. "Aye!" Meynell made him drink a little more brandy, and then he went out to the person standing motionless on the stairs. "What did you want, sir?" said Mrs. Bateson, under her breath. "Mrs. Bateson—he begs you to come to him! He's sorry for his conduct—he says you can see for yourself that he can't wrong you any more. Come—and be merciful!" The woman paused. The Rector could see the shiver of her thin shoulders under her print dress. Then she turned and quietly descended the cottage stairway. Half way down she looked up. "Tell him I should do him nowt but harm. I"—her voice trembled for the first time—"I doan't bear him malice; I hope he'll not suffer. But I'm not comin'." "Wait a moment, Mrs. Bateson! I was to tell you that in spite of all, he loved you—and he wanted your love." She shook her head. "It's no good talkin' that way. It'll mebbe use up his strength. Tell him I'd have got Lizzie Short to come an' nurse 'im, if I could. It's her place. But he knows as she an' her man flitted a fortnight sen, an' theer's no address." And she disappeared. But at the foot of the stairs—standing unseen—she said in her usual tone: "If there was a cup o' tea, I could bring you, sir—or anythin'?" Meynell, distressed and indignant, did not answer. He returned to the sick-room. Bateson looked up as the Rector bent once more over the bed. "She'll not coom?" he said, in a faint voice of surprise. "Well, that's a queer thing. She wasn't used to be a tough 'un. I could most make her do what I wanted. Well, never mind, Rector, never mind. Sit tha down—mebbe you'd be wanting to say a prayer. You're welcome. I reckon it'll do me no harm." His lips parted in a smile—a smile of satire. But his brows frowned, and his eyes were still alive and bright, only now, as the watcher thought, with anger. Meynell hesitated. "I will say the church prayers, if you wish it, Bateson. Of course I will say them." "But I doan't believe in 'em," said the sick man, smiling again, "an' you doan't believe in 'em, noather, if folk say true! Don't tha be vexed—I'm not saying it to cheek tha. But Mr. Barron, ee says ee'll make tha give up. Ee's been goin' roun' the village, talkin' to folk. I doan't care about that—an' I've never been one o' your men—not pious enough, be a long way—but I'd like to hear—now as I can't do tha no harm, Rector, now as I'm goin', an' you cawn't deny me—what tha does really believe. Will tha tell me?" He turned, open-eyed, impulsive, intelligent, as he had always been in life. The Rector started. The inward challenge had taken voice. "Certainly I will tell you, if it will help you—if you're strong enough." Bateson waved his hand contemptuously. "I feel as strong as onything. That sup o' brandy has put some grit in me. Give me some more. Thank tha … Does tha believe in God, Rector?" His whimsical, half-teasing, yet, at bottom, anxious look touched Meynell strangely. "With all my life—and with all my strength!" Meynell's gaze was fixed intently on his questioner. The night-light in the basin on the farther side of the room threw the strong features into shadowy relief, illumining the yearning kindliness of the eyes. "What made tha believe in Him?" "My own life—my own struggles—and sins—and sufferings," said Meynell, stooping toward the sick man, and speaking each word with an intensity behind which lay much that could never be known to his questioner. "A good man, Bateson, put it once in this way, 'There is something in me that asks something of me.' That's easy to understand, isn't it? If a man wants to be filthy, or drunken, or cruel, there is always a voice within—it may be weak or it may be strong—that asks of him to be—instead—pure and sober and kind. And perhaps he denies the Voice, refuses it—talks it down—again and again. Then the joy in his life dies out bit by bit, and the world turns to dust and ashes. Every time that he says No to the Voice he is less happy—he has less power of being happy. And the voice itself dies away—and death comes. But now, suppose he turns to the Voice and says 'Lead me—I follow!' And suppose he obeys, like a child stumbling. Then every time he stretches and bends his poor weak will so as to give It what it asks, his heart is happy; and strength comes—the strength to do more and do better. It asks him to love—to love men and women, not with lust, but with pure love; and as he obeys, as he loves—he knows—he knows that it is God asking, and that God has come to him and abides with him. So when death overtakes him he trusts himself to God as he would to his best friend." "Tha'rt talkin' riddles, Rector!" "No. Ask yourself. When you fell into sin with that woman, did nothing speak to you, nothing try to stop you?" The bright half-mocking eyes below Meynell's wandered a little—wavered in expression. "It was the hot blood in me—aye, an' in her too. Yo cawn't help them things." "Can't you? When your wife suffered, didn't that touch you? Wouldn't you undo it now if you could?" "Aye—because I'm goin'—doctor says I'm done for." "No—well or ill—wouldn't you undo it—wouldn't you undo the blows you gave your wife—the misery you caused her?" "Mebbe. But I cawn't." "No—not in my sense or yours. But in God's sense you can. Turn your heart—ask Him to give you love—love to Him, who has been pleading with you all your life—love to your wife, and your fellow men—love—and repentance—and faith." Meynell's voice shook. He was in an anguish at what seemed to him the weakness, the ineffectiveness, of his pleading. A silence. Then the voice rose again from the bed. "Dost tha believe in Jesus Christ, Rector? Mr. Barron, he calls tha an infidel. But he hasn't read the books you an' I have read, I'll uphold yer!" The dying man raised his hand to the bookshelves beside him with a proud gesture. The Rector slowly raised himself. An expression as of some passion within, trying at once to check and to utter itself, became visible on his face in the half light. "It's not books that settle it, Jim. I'll try and put it to you—just as He paused a moment, frowning under the effort of simplification. The hidden need of the dying man seemed to be mysteriously conveyed to him—the pang of lonely anguish that death brings with it; the craving for comfort beneath the apparent scorn of faith; the human cry expressed in this strange catechism. "Stop me if I tire you," he said at last. "I don't know if I can make it plain—but to me, Bateson, there are two worlds that every man is concerned with. There is this world of everyday life—work and business, sleeping and talking, eating and drinking—that you and I have been living in; and there is another world, within it, and alongside of it, that we know when we are quiet—when we listen to our own hearts, and follow that voice I spoke of just now. Jesus Christ called that other world the Kingdom of God—and those who dwell in it, the children of God. Love is the king of that world, and the law of it—Love, which is God. But different men—different races of men—give different names to that Love—see it under different shapes. To us—to you and to me—it speaks under the name and form of Jesus Christ. And so I come to say—so all Christians come to say—'I believe—in Jesus Christ our Lord'. For it is His life and His death that still to-day—as they have done for hundreds of years—draw men and women into the Kingdom—the Kingdom of Love—and so to God. He draws us to love—and so to God. And in God alone is the soul of man satisfied; satisfied—and at rest." The last words were but just breathed—yet they carried with them the whole force of a man. "That's all very well, Rector. But tha's given up th' Athanasian Creed, and there's mony as says tha doesn't hold by tother Creeds. Wilt tha tell me, as Jesus were born of a virgin?—or that a got up out o' the grave on the third day?" The Rector's face, through all its harass, softened tenderly. "If you were a well man, Bateson, we'd talk of that. But there's only one thing that matters to you now—it's to feel God with you—to be giving your soul to God." The two men gazed at each other. "What are tha nursin' me for, Rector?" said Bateson, abruptly—"I'm nowt to you." "For the love of Christ," said Meynell, steadily, taking his hand—"and of you, in Christ. But you mustn't talk. Rest a while." There was a silence. The July night was beginning to pale into dawn. Outside, beyond the nearer fields, the wheels and sheds and the two great chimneys of the colliery were becoming plain; the tints and substance of the hills were changing. Dim forms of cattle moved in the newly shorn grass; the sound of their chewing could be faintly heard. Suddenly the dying man raised himself in bed. "I want my wife!" he said imperiously. "I tell tha, I want my wife!" It was as though the last energy of being had thrown itself into the cry—indignant, passionate, protesting. Meynell rose. "I will bring her." Bateson gripped his hand. "Tell her to mind that cottage at Morden End—and the night we came home there first—as married folk. Tell her I'm goin'—goin' fast." He fell back, panting. Meynell gave him food and medicine. Then he went quickly downstairs, and knocked at the parlour door. After an interval of evident hesitation on the part of the occupant of the room, it was reluctantly unlocked. Meynell pushed it open wide. "Mrs. Bateson—come to your husband—he is dying!" The woman, deadly white, threw back her head proudly. But Meynell laid a peremptory hand on her arm. "I command you—in God's name. Come!" A struggle shook her. She yielded suddenly—and began to cry. Meynell patted her on the shoulder as he might have patted a child, said kind, soothing things, gave her her husband's message, and finally drew her from the room. She went upstairs, Meynell following, anxious about the physical result of the meeting, and ready to go for the doctor at a moment's notice. The door at the top of the stairs was open. The dying man lay on his side, gazing toward it, and gauntly illumined by the rising light. The woman went slowly forward, drawn by the eyes directed upon her. "I thowt tha'd come!" said Bateson, with a smile. She sat down upon the bed, crouching, emaciated; at first motionless and voiceless; a spectacle little less piteous, little less deathlike, than the man on the pillows. He still smiled at her, in a kind of triumph; also silent, but his lips trembled. Then, groping, she put out her hand—her disfigured, toil-worn hand—and took his, raising it to her lips. The touch of his flesh seemed to loosen in her the fountains of the great deep. She slid to her knees and kissed him—enfolding him with her arms, the two murmuring together. |
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