The Case of Richard Meynell | Page 9

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 Th��ophile 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