Part 55 (1/2)
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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 doc.u.ment 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 quant.i.ty 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 G.o.d for such a thing sounds horrible, but after all, have we any right to be more squeamish than Holy Writ? 'Let G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+ver over the very inadequate fire which was all he allowed himself. Every s.h.i.+lling 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.